Boston designers headline art lectures and citywide logo contest

Janel Shoun  | 

Nancy Skolos and Tom Wedell, owners of Skolos-Wedell, a nationally known design and photography studio in Boston, will kick off the 2007-08 Presidential Lectures in Art and Art History as well as headline the awards ceremony for Nashville’s only Award for Excellence in Logo Design.
Lipscomb’s Department of Art and Advent, the experiential marketing firm, will present the second annual Award for Excellence in Logo Design at the Nov. 5 kick-off of the Presidential Lectures this year in the Ezell Center.

The awards reception will be held Monday, Nov. 5, at 6 p.m., and the lecture by Skolos and Wedell will be held at 7 p.m., both in the Ezell Center. The reception will afford attendees the chance to see all the entries and to vote on the people’s choice award winner before hearing the lecture. Winners will be announced after the lecture, and they must be present to receive prizes.

Skolos and Wedell will discuss the topic of their most recent book Type, Image, Message, exploring the visual and communication properties of type and image and various ways the two can be combined strategically.

The speakers are the principals of Skolos-Wedell, an interdisciplinary design and photography studio in
2006 Logo Entries
Massachusetts. The husband and wife, photographer and designer, work to diminish the boundaries between graphic design and photography, creating collaged three-dimensional images, influenced by modern painting, technology, and architecture.

Skolos is a professor of graphic design and Wedell is a senior critic at the Rhode Island School of Design. The couple’s posters are included in the graphic design collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Israel Museum, and the Museum fur Gestaltung, Zurich.
More than 200 people in the design field and design education attended the first Award for Excellence in Logo Design awards ceremony held in November. Fifty-eight designers entered 129 logo designs last year.

“We had a great mixture of free-lance designers, advertising agencies, publishing houses and university creative departments,” said Amanda Van Noordt, Advent’s event coordinator who worked to plan the contest and awards reception last year. “It really succeeded in bringing the design community together. There were fresh designs from people with a younger perspective and mature, cultured designs that will hold up for many years to come.”

Last year’s winners were Matthew Lehman, of Invisible Associates, for best overall design; Chris Ward, of Thomas Nelson Publishing, for best typography; and Matthew Rogers, of Primarily Rye, LLC, won in the best icon and people’s choice categories.
This year, Nashville and regional graphic designers are encouraged to submit original logo designs through Oct. 29.
Creative logos will be judged in the following categories: creative use of typography; best icon design; people’s choice; and overall design winner.
The overall design winner will win an Apple iPhone and all other winners will receive iPod Nanos. This event is endorsed by the Nashville Scene, Midtown Printing, AIGA, Level 2 Design, the Lipscomb University Department of Marketing and the Lipscomb University Department of Communication.

Logo designs must have been created in the past 24 months and can be submitted at entries [at] nashvillelogodesign.com (entries[at]nashvillelogodesign[dot]com). For more information on contest rules or the Presidential Lectures, designers can log on to www.nashvillelogodesign.com.