Viewing Adobe Design Achievement Award Winners 2009

First, congratulations to all the winners and finalists. Some impressive work. The 9th annual Adobe Design Achievement Awards (ADAA) recognizes outstanding achievement in animation, illustration, packaging, print communications, and 8 other categories by student designers from all over the world. Out of around 3300 submissions, the winners in each category were recognized at a ceremony in Beijing last night.

Some cool prizes too -- including cash and a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 4 Master Collection (What it includes | Buy Direct). Want to see their work? I did. But you have to work for the privilege... 

Maybe I'm dense (don't answer that). But when I clicked on the link (in the press release I received) to go view the winning entries I was a bit perplexed about how to actually view them.  I could select and deselect different categories. But beyond that I was just not getting it.

Dummy me, I didn't realize that what you have to do is match the color-coded list on the left with the little colored (and moving) boxes in the animation on the right. Heck, I thought that big A was just Adobe marketing stuff and that the entries would show up in that window -- nope.

Click on those little boxes -- the ones scattered around in the A when you have categories selected -- and you'll get a not-very-big-non-resizable pop-up with much less ambiguous Prev/Next arrows for reading about and/or viewing the work of the winning entries and the finalists and honorable mentions in each category.

Darn it but that's just too much brainpower (and too-tiny windows) required on a lazy, rainy afternoon.

But now that you know the secret, do go check out the ADAA 2009 winners.