3x3 International ProShow Judges Announced

We’ve just nailed down our international panel of judges for the ninth 3x3 professional show. As always we search for some of the top talent around the world to judge our show.

This year’s judges include Jordan Awan, Art Director, The New Yorker, Andrew J. Nilsen, Art Director, SF Weekly, Gary Cochran, Art Director, London Telegraph, United Kingdom and Shayne Pooley, Creative Director, Ogilvy & Mather, Hong Kong. Our illustrator panel includes Brian Stauffer, Valeria Petrone, Italy, Rod Hunt, United Kingdom and Marco Wagner, Germany.

Categories this year include advertising, animation, books, editorial, editorial spots, fashion, gallery, graphic novels, institutional, medical, posters, sci-fi, self-promotion, sequential, three-dimensional and unpublished. Deadline for entries is March 9, 2012.

What sets 3x3 apart is that unlike many shows all judging is done independently on the each judge’s desktop which allows us to not only secure judges from all over the world but also to avoid any personal biases that tend to creep up when judges are assembled in the same room. Balloting is secret and once the judging sheets have been returned we tabulate the results. A majority of the judges must favor an entry for it to make it into the show; medals are decided based on the judge’s personal selections of top work as well as by the number of judges voting for an individual entry. We’re fortunate to have the only show that is truly international. We look forward to seeing your entries this year.

Our Call for Entries will be going out soon and we’ll be announcing our 3x3 International Student Show and 3x3 International Children’s Show judges in the next several weeks. Stay tuned.

3x3 Directory 2012 Arrives

We’re happy to report that the 3x3 Illustration Directory 2012 is right on schedule, shipments began yesterday from our distributor in Minneapolis. With over 6,000 to be mailed we expect the job to be finished by them by the end of the month. In the meantime participants will begin receiving their copies starting next week. Samples to Europe will take a bit longer.

Thanks to The Prolific Group in Winnipeg for expediting the delivery of the directory.

Cover illustration by Wonil Suh

3x3 Annual Ships

 The 3x3 Illustration Annual No 8 is in the mail and on its way to newsstands around the country and the world. Unfortunately there was a problem with laminating the cover so our printer, The Prolific Group in Winnipeg had to reprint the entire cover before binding the book. There are always so many variables in printing, temperature, humidity, the paper itself, the laminate, so it's never a surprise that things like this happen; fortunately it happened at the right time in the production process, otherwise we would have had a very disappointing cover.

Inside the plant at The Prolific Group

HOW International Design Awards: 4 Years in a Row

What a wonderful way to start off the new year!  We just received notice that 3x3 has been accepted into the HOW International Design Annual. And not just one winner, but three winners: Issue 14, 15 and 16. Also among the winners was a series of issues of our sister publication, Creative Quarterly—for the second year in a row!

This is the fourth year that 3x3 has been honored by HOW and what makes it especially gratifying that our series of magazines were honored. As a judge I know how rare that is, too many times two of the three entries are great and the third is less so, so these judges saw strength in all issues. And to be continually honored each year is an indication that we must be doing something right.

What's also gratifying is that each year a new set of judges are being exposed to the best illustrators around— as they thumb through the entries they had to be impressed by the quality and diversity of the work they were seeing. These are not only design awards for us, these are big announcements that illustration is alive and well and thriving. Since in each of publications illustration is king—not design, the very fact that judges four years in a row have honored us speaks well of the illustration industry.

We’re only as good as the work we present. Our cover artists Paul Blow—Issue 15, Q. Cassetti—Issue 16 and Alessandro Gottardo, aka Shout—Issue 17 certainly caught the attention of the judges as they sifted through the thousands of entries and provided a welcome greeting to what was inside. The judges had to be impressed with our publications cover-to-cover for them to receive this honor, so a great big thank you to these illustrators for making us look good.

Look for the issue on newsstands in March.

3x3 Directory Goes to Press

We’re sending this year's 3x3 Illustration Directory to the printer today. We have a total of 335 illustrators from 29 countries represented inside our 480-page Directory. Work is divided in nine categories ranging from conceptual to children’s, whimsical to decorative, landscape to lettering, figurative to fashion with animal rounding out our categories.

What we’ve found is that art directors and art buyers really like our Directory. They love our selection—our Directory is curated, you must be invited to be in. They love our size—it’s portable. They love our design—single image per page grouped by color or theme. And they like the categories and our online counterpart that clicks directly to the artist’s site. They'll also like the option to view the Directory on their iPad.

Illustrators love our Directory because they’re surrounded by the best illustrators around. And they love our page price, anyone can afford to be in our Directory.

The Directory is distributed free to over 6,000 art directors and art buyers in the United States. The list is highly targeted to those who have an interest in illustration whether they’re in advertising, publishing—magazine and books, in-house corporate, entertainment or design.

The Directory will be distributed in January.

Cover illustration by Wonil Suh

3x3 Annual Goes to Press

We’re sending out the 3x3 Illustration Annual No 8 to the printer today. Chock full of excellent work, this 424 page annual displays most of the images in a single page plus this year we’ve added a separate Medalist section where the medal winners from each of our shows is displayed. Best of Show, Gold, Silver and Bronze winners from the professional show, children’s show and student show will appear in the front of the book, merits and distinguished merits will be displayed by category.

You’ll see some familiar names but also bear witness to some of the new talent our judges found around the world. Looking at 6,164 entries, the judges selected 347 winners. The judges were perhaps the most severe with the student show with only 34 winners from 479 entrants entering from 103 schools worldwide. The children’s show showed more winners from any previous show with a mix of 45% coming from outside the US. A frustration was how few animations were entered—this continues to be a small category; a disappointment was how uninspired judges found many of the unpublished entries this year. Perhaps it’s due to the economy, this should be a category along with self-promotion where experimentation can take place. Gallery was stronger this year than in some previous years, advertising was improved and of course, editorial was strong.

Winners receive a complimentary copy of the annual which we hope to have in the mail by the end of the month; international deliveries take a bit longer. We try to have the annual out in mid-December but due to the holidays and a bout with a terrible bug we fell behind. We also have the 480-page 3x3 Illustration Directory going to press later this month for a delivery date of mid-January, so as you can imagine we’ve been quite busy getting a total of 904 pages out the door, not to mention 84-page income survey and 252-pages of Creative Quarterly during the production process.

We’re rounding up next year’s judging panel as we speak and will start accepting entries mid-January for Annual No 9. Mark your calendars: deadline for the professional show is March 2, student show, March 23 and the children’s show, April 20.

Congratulations to all our winners. Look for the annual on selected newsstands worldwide; we’ll also be sending a free digital version of the annual to a select group of art directors and art buyers in the US.

Cover illustration by Bill Mayer

István Orosz Exhibition in New York

István Orosz (1951), one of the most prolific and best known printmakers, graphic artists and animated filmmakers of Central Europe has been creating his trademark art often employing forced perspectives, anamorphoses, illusions and impossible objects since the 1970s. Initially best known for his prints (including film and exhibition posters), his resumé has expanded to include unique trompe l’oeil graphics and some of the most inspired animated films to come out of Hungary (or Europe, for that matter).

He has had individual shows in Chicago (I Space Gallery), The Hague (Escher Museum) and over a dozen other major cities and art centers. Prizes awarded to István Orosz include the Gold Medal at the Biennial of Graphic Design (Brno), the Creative Distinction Award of the European Design Annual (Dublin), the Gold medal at the Annual Exhibition of the Society of Illustrators (NewYork) and the Main Prize of the KAFF Animated Film Festival (Kecskemét).

Join us to celebrate István Orosz’ first solo exhibition in New York, featuring posters, graphic art and animated shorts on multiple screens.

The opening will be followed by a reception with the artist.

December 14, 7pm
Hungarian Cultural Center
447 Broadway {between Canal and Grand}, 5th Floor