UX Australia News

Badge design competition

29 June 2009

As we ramp up for UX Australia, we start to turn our attention to the details of staging the conference: bags and schwag; social events; the conference schedule; and that critical, but oft-ignored piece that every attendee carries with them – the conference badge.

We’ve been to a lot of conferences over the years, and worn a lot of conference badges. Most were pretty bare bones:

Steve Baty
Attendee

Sometimes they’d add my company; maybe let me choose a nickname; or leave a space so I could slot in a business card. Usually though, the badge was a utilitarian affair, and not very useful at that.

For UX Australia, we’d like to do better than ‘utilitarian’ – even with our badges. And we’d like to give you a chance to win something and help us in the process. That’s right: we’re running a design competition for our conference badges.

The Prize

We’re offering a one-year subscription to any of the products from Optimal Workshop (Optimal Sort for card sorting, Treejack for testing an information architecture or Chalkmark for testing an interface) valued at around AU$700.

The Brief

Design a conference badge that:

  • identifies the wearer to others
  • can be attached to a lanyard
  • is a lot more useful than that.

We don’t want to be too prescriptive; be as creative as you like. We’ll be judging based on how the badge improves the experience of attending a conference, and whether it meets the basic criteria above.

Submissions

To enter the competition you need to submit your design prior to midnight (AEST) July 19th. Upload your design to flickr and add it to the UX Australia group and tag it badgecomp. Your entry should include enough information that we can understand the concept – include multiple views if needed.

Judging will be carried out during the week of July 20th and we’ll announce a winner here by July 26th.

Keep an eye on the flickr group and comment on your favourite designs – we don’t mind a nudge in the right direction ;)

Conditions

The ‘winner’ will be judged by UX Australia and will be either the design we want to use or, if none are suitable, the best design. We won’t necessarily use one of the entries, but we hope to! If we don’t select your design we claim no ownership over it, other than whatever logos or marks of ours went into it in the first place. If we do select your design, by entering the competition you agree to let us use your design for our badges.

Files

Here are the source files for our logo (ZIP, 2MB). If you’d like any of the other images from the website, please let us know)

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5 Responses to “Badge design competition”

Matt Balara says:
June 29, 2009 at 1:21 pm

Speaking of “whatever logos or marks of ours”, it would make the job of designing your badge *much* easier if you provided vector graphics of said logos & marls. Thanks!

Sharpenr - A better conference badge says:
July 19, 2009 at 1:30 pm

[...] team behind UX Australia has been running a badge design competition to change all of that, and in late June I joined a very interesting discussion on what constitutes [...]

A better conference experience says:
July 22, 2009 at 9:37 am

[...] first point is mostly a design issue and this is where the UX Australia competition is focused. But the badge itself has limitations on how useful it can be no matter how creatively [...]

A better conference badge « Sharpenr says:
December 29, 2009 at 9:02 am

[...] team behind UX Australia has been running a badge design competition to change all of that, and in late June I joined a very interesting discussion on what constitutes [...]