Last night, the Digital Media Association of Alberta celebrated the best work of the 2007 year. This event marked the return of the DMAA Awards after a 5 year hiatus. The Gala event was well attended by students and professionals from across the province. Mount Royal College hosted the event in their new Continuous Learning Centre. The facilities were fresh and polished. The major event sponsors included SAIT, Mount Royal College, Critical Mass, Cambrian House, the Edmonton Sun and the Calgary Sun.
I had the pleasure of co-presenting the Designer of the Year Award with Jasmine the effervescent Marketing Maven from Cambrian House. If you haven't checked out Cambrian House yet, you really should. It is clever, irreverent and pushes us into really using the web and social network environment in a new way, rather than the classic "rear-view mirror" versions of Web 2.0 stuff.
I didn't realize I was going to be asked to say a few words, so I pulled a quote out of the back of my brain and I didn't get it quite right (I also forgot whose quote it was). So, for those of you who are interested, here is the full quote I was referring to.
"Questions about whether design is necessary or affordable are quite beside the point: design is inevitable. The alternative to good design is bad design, not no design at all. Everyone takes design decisions all the time without realizing it - like Moliere's M. Jourdain who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life - and good design is simply the result of making these decisions consciously, at the right stage, and in consultation with others as the need arises."
Douglas Martin, Book Design
It is one of my favourite quotes and I use it regularly.
The Awards were a success in my mind. I have a few recommendations about how to impove on it next year, but that is just the theatre director in me. Most of all, I hope the momentum of energy created by the awards this year will continue and result in more entries, more attendees and more of the great stuff of last night.
