With the stabilization of the pandemic, the 16th edition of the Pentawards packaging design competition finally returned offline, with a total of 352 entries standing out. In addition to the highly anticipated Diamond and Platinum Awards, as well as the Gold, Silver, and Bronze Awards, the Pentawards also present special awards each year to designers with significant achievements. This year's special awards include the Agency of the Year, Industry Disruptor, Core Award, People's Choice Award, and NXT-GEN*** student works.
Annual *** Design Agency
Winner: SeriesNemo (Spain)
SeriesNemo bagged five awards at this year's Pentawards, including three gold, one silver and one bronze. The multidisciplinary design studio was founded in Barcelona in 1991 and covers all areas related to design, focusing on brand image and packaging. Team members come from fields such as industrial design, graphics, architecture, printing and communication. SeriesNemo's philosophy is to create products with a unique personality in terms of form and function, and to find a balance between design proposition and brand message. Since its establishment, SeriesNemo has been recognized in many international competitions and awards, including Pentawards, iF Design Awards, German Design Award, Red Dot Design Awards, etc. The three works that won the gold award this time all adhere to the concept of sustainability, made of recycled glass or natural fiber materials, and the packaging bottles can be stacked for storage through special geometric modeling, and are also very convenient to assemble and transport.
SeriesNemo's gold award-winning design
Industry Disruption Award
Winner: Davide Mosconi, Auge Design (Italy)
The “Industry Disruptor Award” is a new addition to the Pentawards in 2022, aiming to recognize trailblazing designers or agencies who actively drive design innovation and break the mold. This year's recipient is Davide Mosconi, Art Director and Creative Partner at Auge Design. The Italian graphic designer led his team to win five awards, including one gold, two silver, and two bronze.
Auge Design is a brand and packaging studio founded in 2016 whose design philosophy is not just about aesthetics. With partners mostly hailing from the world of communications, the agency has a strong strategic perspective in its design. In a collaboration with the snack brand The Perfect Pop, Auge Design created an impressive modular packaging system for it. The innovative popcorn buckets, adorned with bold patterns including gold stripes and kernels, and the minimalist design give this common snack a luxurious personality. Thanks to a modular base with a matching system, these popcorn buckets can be stacked together to form an interesting tower-like structure.
Gold winner: The Perfect Pop popcorn
Core Award
Winner: Backbone Branding (Armenia)
The Core Award is also a new addition to the Pentawards in 2022, aiming to encourage entries that have won 10 awards in the competition, recognizing their continued creative excellence. This year's ** Core Award was given to Backbone Branding, who were named Design Agency of the Year in 2019 and 2020, and won 5 Gold, 2 Silver, and 3 Bronze in this year's competition.
The design studio Backbone Branding from Armenia, founded by Stepan Azaryan after graduating from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan, began his extensive practice in various design fields in 2010, when he founded Backbone Branding. In 2016, Stepan Avanesyan joined the studio as a partner and brand strategy consultant. Backbone Branding specializes in using color and patterns to create eye-catching packaging systems for brands, and in this work, whether it's jam, agricultural products, or chocolate, you can see the use of bright tones and unique graphics in packaging.
Backbone Branding's gold award-winning design
People's Choice Award
Winner: Pentagram, UK, for Heights
The Pentawards design competition not only takes expert opinions as the basis for evaluation, but also dares to listen to the public's voice. As part of the 2022 competition, the jury let the participants of the Pentawards Festival vote for an outstanding work, which is the People's Choice Award. This year, Pentagram’s Heights stood out from 10 design works and won the favor of all participants.
Pentagram is a well-known design company founded in 1972, renowned for its partner-based structure. For this project, Pentagram developed packaging bottles and transport boxes for Heights, a health startup. Their first product is designed to enhance and expand cognitive abilities by nourishing the brain. Heights employs a direct-to-consumer sales strategy, distributing products through mailboxes. Therefore, the packaging needed to be less than 25mm in thickness to achieve the goal of efficient delivery. The packaging bottle designed by Pentagram has a shape that is different from the cold, scientific design language used by traditional health brands. It has a soft, asymmetric appearance, like a flat thought bubble, with a transparent shell for the capsules inside, allowing users to see the natural ingredients. The design team used biodegradable PLA material, effectively reducing the carbon footprint. The transport box, which has a tray-like shape, is also made of biodegradable materials, mainly from sugarcane, a by-product of the sugar industry.
NXT-GEN***Student Work Award
Winners: Martí Garcés Muntalt, Lesley Melissa Batista Víquez and Trinidad Mosso Tupper, ELISAVA, Spain
Every year the Pentawards jury selects a student work from each category to receive the NXT-GEN award, and this year’s winner is Martí Garcés Muntalt, Lesley Melissa Batista Víquez and Trinidad Mosso Tupper from the Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, ELISAVA.
The set of "PHB-Zero Waste Packaging" they designed is made of FORMcard material, a kind of bioplastic created by Peter Marigold, which is 100% non-toxic and can be continuously melted and reused. These students used FORMcard material in the packaging of toothbrushes, and the outer packaging can also serve as the handle of the toothbrush, with a highly futuristic shape. As an alternative to disposable packaging, the "PHB-Zero Waste Packaging" follows the concept of sustainable development and reduces the impact on the environment to the ***.
Datapark summary
As the "Oscar Award" in the field of packaging design, Pentawards not only provides a stage for young studios and students to showcase their strength, but also makes some old-school design companies more well-known. Looking at this year's winning works, "sustainability" is undoubtedly the most important industry trend. From liquor, toothbrushes to agricultural products, health capsules, sustainable packaging has gradually entered all aspects of daily life, and at the same time, it shows a more diversified design style. In addition, more and more brands hope to show the sustainability of products as transparently as possible through packaging design, so as to win the favor of users.
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