This year’s winning projects in the popular German-language graphic design competition amaze with their great wit, explosive color schemes, as well as meticulous workmanship, and serve as impressive proof that a poster can be more than just a banal advertising space. Furthermore, a large number of the winning works rely on subtly playing with typography. Even the production process was host to some innovative ideas: this year’s competition shows that posters can be knitted simply using high-tech processes and that a thermal emergency blanket can be used as the medium for a silkscreen print. 
Hardly any other medium is so clearly geared towards consumption while also setting topical trends. “[…] time after time, the poster designer challenges him-/herself and takes pleasure in discovering successful symbols,” says Götz Gramlich, President of the association 100 Beste Plakate e. V. He believes, “A good poster continues to develop its meaning in the mind of the observer.”
 
Comprising Richard van der Laken (Amsterdam, chairman), Christof Nardin (Vienna), Jiri Oplatek (Basel), Nicolaus Ott (Berlin), and Ariane Spanier (Berlin), the panel of international experts chose the 100 winning posters for 2014 from among more than 1 800 individual submissions—consisting of commissioned work, self-initiated posters, self-promotion, as well as student projects from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
 
575 entrants had taken part in the competition, 48 of whom were from Austria, 128 from Switzerland, and 399 from Germany. The front-runner among the top 100 posters is Switzerland with 51 winning projects, followed by Germany with 44 and Austria with 5 selected submissions.
 
Conceived by sensomatic design (Christine Zmölnig and Florian Koch, Vienna), this year’s catalog offers not only reproductions of all of the winning posters and their designers’ contact details, but also a fascinating article by Thomas Friedrich: On the dialectics of image and text in today’s posters. He pointedly elaborates the contextuality of posters, explaining the subject wittily and visually with the aid of a poster for a bullfight. Buy the catalog for more information!
 
Sensomatic design, Vienna, is also responsible for the corporate design of this year’s competition and the new web visuals. Since June 2014, the new online archive on the 100 Beste Plakate e. V. website has provided a complete overview of all award-winning works from 2001 to 2014.
www.100-beste-plakate.de
 
The exhibition is a cooperation between the MAK and 100 Beste Plakate e. V.

100-beste-plakate.de