Announcing the winners of the 2021 RGD Student Awards
After receiving over 850 entries from students across Canada, the RGD Award winners have been announced. The 2021 program accepted entries under 21 categories representing a range of disciplines and areas of specialty.
This year, Context Creative was pleased to sponsor a new award category: Storytelling Design. Lionel Gadoury, Principal and Director of Strategy and Creative Services, explains the significance:
“Storytelling Design reflects a significant shift in marketing and design trends, as clients large and small embrace this very human concept. To me, storytelling is about engaging hearts and minds. It’s about communicating in a manner that is memorable and gets audiences to tell a brand’s story in their own words. It’s about creating content and demonstrating thought leadership that people want to share and engage with.
We chose to keep the category broad enough so that storytelling could apply to long-form articles, a good video, or even an infographic. Any project with a compelling narrative, across any medium, was eligible and the range of responses reflected richly diverse views and interpretations.”
2021 Award for Storytelling Design: Crooked Line
Winner: Maham Momin, Student RGD, OCAD University, Toronto, ON
Educator Support: Keith Rushton
Award Sponsor: Context Creative
Project Description: This collective, through photographs and typography reflecting displacement and fragmentation, aims to connect and educate children of South Asian immigrants, through stories of their ancestors filling the gaps in the knowledge, experiences and culture that are often felt by the South Asian children abroad. The red circles further connected with each other represents community and at the same time show intergenerational trauma as a result of the partition and migration.
Honourable Mentions
- The Devil Wears Zara: Benya Sutyanyong, Student RGD, York University/Sheridan College, Toronto/Oakville, ON
- Vancouver’s Lost Souls: Sophie Young, Capilano University, North Vancouver, BC
- Komunidad: Meagan Malixi Provisional RGD, York University/Sheridan College, Toronto/Oakville, ON
Christine Caruso, who participated in the jury selection for the category, was impressed with the quality and range of submissions.
“The submissions for the 2021 Storytelling Design award were exceptional. One of the themes that emerged in this category was around identity. Many designers used their work to express, explore and question ideas about culture, heritage, race, gender and sexuality. The explorations shared personal journeys, memories and intimate stories about family.”
About the RGD Student Awards
The RGD’s Student Awards program brings industry professionals together with emerging designers to promote excellence and encourage the next generation of design professionals to the highest levels of creativity, innovation and conceptualization. Since its launch in 1998, the RGD has distribute over $350,000 under the program.
See the list of this year’s winners here: https://www.rgd.ca/studentsgrads/student-awards/2021
