C&G Wins Four Times, Setting a New Record and a First Across All Disciplines, at GDUSA 2021

Reflecting the many ways in which graphic design shapes business, society, culture, and causes, the 58th Annual American Graphic Design Awards by Graphic Design USA gave four wins to C&G Partners projects. This is a new record for the firm, and the first to span all of our disciplines in one award year: brand, exhibition, media, print, signage and web. The wins: Native New York, the new permanent exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; the multi-award-winning ADC100 anniversary brand takeover; the Kress Foundation’s online platform for European art; and a new sculptural strategy for donor recognition at The Rockefeller University.

The exhibition Native New York follows a 400-mile path across five centuries, showing us that New York is—and always has been—a Native place. Partnering with the museum team on exhibition, graphic, and media design for this project in downtown “Manahatta,” the studio conceived the exhibition like a walk-in graphic novel, constantly in motion.

A centennial anniversary brand takeover and interactive timeline for the ADC100 celebrated the longest-running awards program in design. C&G worked with The One Club for Creativity to develop the project’s brand identity and an online content strategy with animations to span the centennial year.

An ambitious sculptural strategy for recognizing donors and commemorating scientific prize winners at The Rockefeller University rethinks how donor recognition systems are designed. This signage project comprises two sculptural hemispheres at a heroic scale, made of hundreds of steel parts, set in complex curves.

The Kress Foundation website brings over 3,000 works of art from the Kress collection into the public view in a single place, and allows extremely close-up views of the entire set. A powerful digital viewer based on the IIIF API allows users to zoom to levels that expose brushstrokes, paint textures, and the evidence of time in extreme detail.

View selected projects on GDUSA 2021 Annual Awards online showcase, or in the print edition, due out soon.