The proliferation of awards shows and gala awards evenings in our cultural calendars means that almost every evening, someone, somewhere, is carrying home an award that says, "You like me, you really really like me!" In the film industry alone, the Academy Awards vies with the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Directors Guild Awards, and dozens of others.

Despite rumors that some awards are used for purposes other than that for which they were designed (there is at least one Emmy recipient who uses his statuette as a toilet paper holder), most awards hold a place of honor and are proudly displayed as symbols of recognition and accomplishment.

The Oscar is widely acknowledged as a winner in award design-sleek and elegant, easy to grasp and hoist in triumph. But some awards are not as well conceived or executed ... they are unwieldy, awkward, sharp-edged, even dangerous.

Design guru George Lois says that "most awards are goddamned ugly. But the Oscar is the best-looking one. It's not very conceptual, though ... nobody knows who Oscar is."

The Oscar was designed in 1928 by Cedric Gibbons, an art director at MGM. From Gibbons' sketches of a male nude holding a sword, standing on a reel of film with five spokes representing the different constituencies in the motion picture industry, sculptor George Stanley fashioned the prototype for Oscar. Scott Siegel, president of R.S. Owens, which has manufactured the award for the last 23 years, says the statuette weighs 8.5 lbs. and is made of a high-grade pewter base with four layers of electroplating atop the base: first nickel, then copper, then silver, and finally, 24K gold.

In contrast to the monochromatic metal of most awards, Milton Glaser's iridescent cubist portrait of Shakespeare, the award given by the Theater For a New Audience, is positively giddy. Photograph by Matthew Klein ©2006 Massimo Vignelli, a legendary designer who has, like Lois, won many awards, concurs that most of the mainstream awards "are badly designed, because they are corny and unimaginative ... they try to have too many meanings and are not conceptual at all. The Tony Award is a complicated thing with a globe ... but, compared to the others, the Oscar is OK."

Vignelli and Lois have designed quite a few awards between them, and both agree that they prefer a conceptual rather than a literal approach. When asked whether design awards tend to be better designed than others, Vignelli agreed that, generally speaking, they are much better, "especially than those in the entertainment industry, which tend to be gross."

"I have received some wonderful awards from international design organizations," says Vignelli. "A beautiful cone of marble from the Art Directors Club of Italy, for example. The cube award of the ADC here [New York] is also nice. An award doesn't have to be meaningful; it can be a beautiful object, a piece of sculpture."

"For a company in Italy, I designed an award by commissioning the sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro, who created a . at square," Vignelli continues. "An award should have an intellectual elegance, which has value in itself. It should be a work of art."

Vignelli's award for the Society of Publication Designers is a simple folded page, sitting at a 90-degree angle. "A publication has many pages," he explains. "Once you fold a piece of paper, it has four pages, and then it is a minimal publication." His design for the Rockefeller Award from the Museum of Modern Art, given every year to outstanding personalities, is similarly minimalist.

Lois likes the National Magazine Award, a replica of an Alexander Calder stabile. Given by the American Society of Magazine Editors, the "Ellie" (as it is familiarly known, due to its resemblance to an elephant) is hefty, sharp-edged, difficult to grasp, and quite large, commanding a substantial "footprint" on the desk of its recipients ... but "getting a Calder is hot stuff," says Lois.

In 1972, as the president of the New York Art Directors Club, Lois started the Art Directors Hall of Fame. He and Gene Federico collaborated on designing an award of two sterling silver shapes that . t together to form a sculptural A and D. Lois also designed the well-known One Club Creative Hall of Fame Award, a thick, short pencil sharpened to a point at both ends.

Though MTV's "moonman" Video Music Award was based on Lois' groundbreaking "I Want My MTV" campaign, he did not design the award itself.

Lois' tongue-in-cheek award for the restaurant industry depicts a happily munching diner. Lois' irreverent humor is evident in another award he designed: "I named it the DiRoNA, an acronym for their unwieldy corporate name [Distinguished Restaurants of North America]. In an homage to the sculptor Elie Nadelman, I depicted a Nadelman-like profile, sublimely munching a gourmet meal from one of the 300 restaurants who still proudly display it."

Milton Glaser has designed a number of awards, most recently the Juilliard Medal, the Theater for a New Audience Medal, and the New York Post Liberty Medal. Of course, he has received many awards, though he has found that not all are worth keeping. One he received from the Design & Culture Design Alliance "was so ugly I threw it away ... it was a piece of dreck," he says. (It was rescued from the trash by Mirko Ilic´, who asked Glaser if he could keep it. The two have design offices in the same building.)

Glaser says, "Despite the fact that Oscar is a terrible sculpture-a male of questionable virility, it has become the prototype for all awards." Glaser admits that his taste in awards is driven by the fact that "I am a storyteller, driven by narrative." His favorites are the St. Gaudens Medal (designed by the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens and awarded by Cooper Union), the AIGA Medal, and the Society of Illustrators Medal, depicting a buffalo, all of which were designed 50 to 60 years ago. "That probably makes me sound like an old curmudgeon," notes Glaser, "although that is an appellation with which I am becoming increasingly comfortable."

One of the most beautiful design awards is the one William Drenttel designed in 1999 for the Smithsonian National Design Museum, the National Design Award Trophy. "Conceptually," Drenttel says, "it is an award which cuts across all design professions, so it starts with the graphic and typographic symbol of an asterisk and takes that shape into 3D form, representing industrial design." The trophy also alludes to the role of technology in design, since it is created from the hardest man-made material, silicon carbide. "So many design awards are transitory," says Drenttel. "We wanted this award to last and to become a permanent part of the identity of the museum."

The award weighs exactly 2 lbs., and is 9.5 inches high. "We also wanted this object to be holdable and tactile," Drenttel says. He recounts that "when industrial designer Eva Zeisel, who is almost 100 years old, was presented with this award last year, she couldn't stop fondling it ... to make an object that another designer wants to fondle is very satisfying."

Whether the qualities that are desirable in an award include "fondleability" along with conceptual clarity, enduring elegance, and sculptural beauty, perhaps we need to have an Award Award ... and may the best award win.

This article was originally published in the March/April 2005 issue of STEP inside design magazine.

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