You'll (hopefully) forgive the lack of blog posting last week; we spent the entire week setting up and then managing the process of judging HOW's biggest annual design awards. It's a ton of work, and it involves thousands of numbered stickers, about 5,000 feet of white butcher paper, two cases of diet soda, a bagful of red Twizzlers and three colored pens. Among other things.

The process is this: Take 100 eight-foot tables, laid end-to-end in a cavernous public-event space; roll out white paper over the tables, lay out entries by category, add stickers to label each entry, roll out white paper over the entries, repeat. Until you have maybe six layers of paper/stickers/entries. Like this:

From there, the judges, each with a colored pen, walk among the tables and enters a score of 0 to 3 for each entry. Entries that meet a minimum score make it into the awards annual. Sometimes, the judges feel free to add their own commentary as they go along:



We'll post more this week about the judging process and the judges' observations, so stay tuned ...