Gulf News designer wins international contest

Dubai: The next cover of The Best of News Design book has a Middle East touch.

A designer from Gulf News, Hugo A. Sanchez, won the competition for graphic designers from around the world to create the book cover of the 33rd edition of Society for News Design (SND), the prestigious and biggest news design competition with more than 1,600 prints. Online entries from 26 countries were judged in Syracuse and Muncie in USA. The winners will be showcased in the SND's annual The Best of News Design book.

The competition had 46 entries from different countries and online vote, a second stage, narrowed down the list to eight finalists and the public choose the winner. This is the first time SND did an online public vote to choose their cover.

"We have had a cover competition in the past years, but the difference this year was we let the public vote on their favourite. It was a really fun process that generated a ton of interest — we've never had more comments on the site and seldom more votes" says Jonathon Berlin, President of SND.

"Getting proposed covers from the designers give us a perspective that we did not have in the book's early years. The cover competition, without a doubt, is one of the successful things we have done in recent years to make the book outstanding. We invite anyone with ideas and suggestions to send them to the competition committee. We are very open to suggestions that will improve both the book and the print competition," Marshall Matlock, Competition Committee Director said.

According to Hugo, who works as senior graphic artist at Gulf News, the winning cover was decided by a voting process.

"I didn't want to use a techy style to reflect modernity, I don't think it was necessary, put a hologram, a room filled with Ipads, little colour lights, metal sliding doors or any technology cliché. I used simple elements that right now you could find in the house of a SND member or in a meeting room," he said.

The result was not a surprise. "Since the beginning, I knew that Hugo's proposal was among the best ones, we at Gulf News are happy and proud with his achievement, especially because the level of competition increases each year and become more complicated to propose something unique, simple and powerful" says Miguel Angel Gomez, Art Director of Al Nisr Media group.

Not only Gulf News, but SND headquarters were also pleased with the result.

"And the result is fantastic. Hugo A. Sanchez's idea really captures a moment in news design and it's an image you can kind of explore and get lost in. It was a great process and a result we can all be proud of" Jonathon said.

Gulf News is an award-winning publication and has won many international design competitions. It is one of the first publications to invest in design in the region and has an outstanding design team. Last year's 32nd edition SND cover winner was Adonis Durado, a former Al Nisr Art editor in the free weekly Xpress newspaper.