Opening Lines
It's What You Know
Since 1999, the Young Designers Competition has recognized talented student designers and their personal-care packaging creations. One of the criteria for winning packages has been that they be commercially reproducible at a reasonable cost. The contest organizer, ICMAD (Independent Cosmetic Manufacturers & Distributors), considered changing that criterion following its 2000 program out of concern that it might be stifling creativity. ICMAD asked the competition's judges to weigh in on the issue. Should the requirement stay, or should it go?
Feedback was mixed.
Some felt the students should be allowed free rein. They would have plenty of time to deal with commerciality and real-world factors after college. Let the restriction go, they said.
Others felt the students should have to confront cost and production-oriented factors. They would face such real-world factors in the workforce soon enough. Keep the requirement in place, they said.
Ultimately, ICMAD kept it.
Was it the right decision? Some in industry might not think so, but I do. ICMAD made the right move, taking action not against creativity, but for the knowledge that precedes it.
"A real-world design competition is about education, not about stifling students' creativity," says Kenneth Noskin, director of package innovation for Coty US LLC (New York City) and a judge of the 2000 and 2001 competitions. "The student who'll do well in the [workforce]," he says, "is the one who knows the restrictions and can still be creative."
Carl Lombardi, president of Lombardi Design & Manufacturing (Freeport, NY), says, "Good designers know what limits exist and how to push them." In the real world, "sometimes they need to take their designs a little beyond what they know they can afford, because it pushes manufacturers to come up with new ways to make things happen," says Lombardi. But only designers who know what they're doing conceptually and technologically know when and how to push.
For some student designers, such knowledge begins at a college like the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT; New York City), one of several participating schools in ICMAD's competition. FIT's communication design program includes two years of basic technical-skills training and two more-specialized years in packaging, advertising, or graphic design, says Susan Cotler-Block, chair of FIT's communication design department. "We strive to balance the technical and the creative," says Cotler-Block. "They go hand in glove."
Such synergy is what ICMAD chose by not changing its criterion in 2001. The results were positive. For example, third-place winner Bo Ram Kim, a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, created a sophisticated package for her dot body toner using just two colors on a white bottle. Also adept creatively and technically were Brad Adamic (Columbus College of Art & Design; Columbus, OH) and Tia Romano (FIT), with their first-place DermaCure and second-place Bug Off designs, respectively. Congratulations to all.
Lori Bryan
Editor