Banmen wins ZCOOL 2018 Special Jury Award

Recently, the 2018 ZCOOL Awards Night, sponsored by ZCOOL, was held in Beijing. At the event, the list of 16 Creative Design Awards and 15 Special Jury Awards was unveiled. Banmen (2017), designed and published by UCD, won the Special Jury Award of the publication category. 

ZCOOL is a renowned designers website and has held the comprehensive design awards ZCOOL Awards for two consecutive sessions. After extensive works solicitation in a half year, 16 authoritative masters selected 191 commercial design works of the year. In the selection of publications, Banmen excelled from more than 20 publications and won the Special Jury Award. 

Banmen is a magazine published by UCD. Since 2016, a total of eight issues in two series were published. The first series centered on four building materials: timber, concrete, iron and stone; the second series themed on four building design patterns: square, circle, line and angle. The articles cover a wide range of topics and base on architecture, with a focus on design, art, lifestyle and so on. 

Banmen did not created any fragmented text for the sensation of the public, but shared inspiration, ideas and experience of authors acquired through digesting a number of books and hands on experience in a period in a plain manner. Meanwhile, we continuously uphold the most important innovation consciousness in design so that the magazine has its own “evolution” in both content and pattern.

Lyu Jingren, one of the professional judges of the publication design, is a master of book design, an illustrator, a visual artist, and professor at the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University, and member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).

Mr. Lyu commented in his presentation speech for Banmen: Banmen has a well-defined illustration system and establishes the layout and structure of the typography with the concept of architecture. It perfectly arranges the font, font size, textual gray scale and the primary and the secondary relationship in reading; and has a very clear sense of editorial design in the management of paper language and the colorful settings. Although it is a general reading material, the designer has heavily invested in the magazine, reflecting the superb ability in the overall book design language and grammar. The title "Banmen" carefully considers the font of Juzhen Imitation Song typeface, which is consistent with the content and context, and strengthens the text language of the space, the construction of the main content of the book, and the rational analysis and configuration of color. It doesn't have gorgeous embellishment in design, but the design thinking in many details is inspiring and gives readers a good reading feeling.