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4 Ways to Win a Design Award

Take advantage and attract clients to your portfolio

The Room
UX Planet
Published in
4 min readMay 4, 2021

We always knew a portfolio is important. You know, it’s like human need air to survive, designers also need portfolio not just to present their skills, but simply to be called designers. We knew that cool projects can win awards and lots of design studios pay 99% of marketing campaigns to such competitions.

Designed in TheRoom

Unfortunately, we never had time to participate in any competitions earlier. Clients, projects, deadlines — working routine was following us step by step not leaving a single place for creativity. But then, we’ve conducted complex market research and found out, that content marketing is the most powerful sales tool for designers and design studios. And that’s when we’ve started taking designs competitions seriously.

Rule 1: Think of the Design Competitions as of Work

We usually prefer submitting real projects to competitions. We did so on Awwwards, CSS Design Awards and we did so on RedDot. However, not all designers have strong projects in their portfolio to submit and win. Also, it often happens when you, as a designer, so as an artist, just want to create a visualization of your vision of the surrounding world. That’s when people start creating abstract works, that never existed in contracts and agreements.

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It’s doesn’t matter what you choose — you should always take competitions seriously. Both of you’re submitting your life project and if you are making an award-winning work, you need to think of it as a complex and serious product, that will be seen by thousands of people. That’s why: be attentive to all the details. Competitions are like a pink-coloured ocean with sweet, but super hungry sharks. All sweet and nice, they will be criticizing you for any wrong pixel. So, you need to make sure your design is perfect.

Rule 2: Choose Right Context

Context is everything. You need to pick up the right project for the right competition. There will be no sense in submitting an art-related website with gradients and…

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Published in UX Planet

UX Planet is a one-stop resource for everything related to user experience.

Written by The Room

UI/UX design boutique From the very begging of times people were wondering about the riddle of the closed door. We’ve found the way to make the mystery public

Responses (1)

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Context is everything. You need to pick up the right project for the right competition.

If someone starting up was to take one thing out of your article, i would suggest this little nugget of wisdom right here. Some platforms value "substance", and some are all about "style" - and very rarely do they tend to overlap. So yeah, context is everything!

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