44th annual creative competition
Winners judged in 2023 on work published in 2022
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The Society for News Design is proud to announce results from the 44th edition of the Best of News Design Creative Competition. Winners were selected by 47 visual journalists who gathered in New York to assess the best work published in 2022. More than 35 organizations and seven countries — including Dubai and South Korea — were represented in the makeup of the judging panel.
For the first time, judging of entries for the digital and print competitions happened simultaneously. The intense, standard-setting competition culminated in a never-before-publicized Best in Show discussion held by the print judges at the Annual Workshop.
The Best of News Design Creative Competition honors excellence in visual storytelling, design and journalism produced in 2022. Winners were announced live during the competition except for our highest honors, World’s Best Designed Newspaper, World’s Best Digital News Experience, World’s Best Digital Designer and Digital’s Best in Show, which were announced the week following the workshop. Related: Categories and how to enter.
Below are our databases of 44th edition winners. Use the filter and sort functions to view awards by entry, publication or category. We will update the database periodically throughout judging. And make sure to follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook to see gold medal winners!
Digital Results
Print Results
About the Digital Competition
The Society for News Design’s Best of Digital Design is a juried competition sponsored by the Society for News Design to recognize journalistic excellence in storytelling, graphics, social media and product design. The goal of the contest is to identify the best of journalism that pushes the boundaries of design and technology. By submitting, you help define the state of the art for our industry and all storytellers.
Awards
World’s Best Designed: Each year, the highest goal of this competition is to identify work that has fundamentally shifted or improved how news and information is delivered across digital platforms. This award has been given to websites and apps, but also to overall experiences or organizations.
World’s Best Designer: World’s Best Designer is given to the individual designer that has the strongest portfolio among all individual portfolio categories
Best in Show: SND Digital’s Best in show is meant to recognize the best individual entries from the entire competition. Best in Show awards are divided by organizational size to take those challenges into consideration. This year, we have:
- Best in Show for small organizations
- Best in Show for medium organizations
- Best in Show for large organizations
Gold Medals: Visual storytelling that defines the state of the art. These entries must stretch the limits of creativity both visually and technically. They must be groundbreaking in both form and fit — telling their story in the most powerful way imaginable. It should be perfect or as near as one can reasonably come. Any entry receiving this award should be held up as the gold standard for the design community.
Silver Medals: The aesthetic and technical proficiency of these entries should stretch the limits of the medium — representing an elevated level of execution and originality in pursuit of powerful storytelling. It should be nearly impossible to find anything deficient.
Bronze Medals: Recognizes visual storytelling at the leading edge of craftsmanship or innovation. These entries should demonstrate technical mastery, aesthetic mastery, or both. Entries receiving a Bronze Medal must have an elevated level of execution, originality or degree of difficulty.
Award of Excellence: Recognizes outstanding and excellent visual storytelling. These entries go beyond mere technical or aesthetic competency and may push the boundaries of originality and creativity.
The Judges
- Joanna S. Kao, Financial Times
- Erin Aulov, Politico
- Emil Thorbjörnsson, The Daily Newspaper Information
- Kaeti Hinck, CNN
- Elena Mejia, Freelance
- Alvin Chang, The New School
- Sharon Denning, Dow Jones
- Michael Grant, Get Current Studio
- Hilary Fung, San Francisco Chronicle
- Matt Daniels, The Pudding
- Matthew Weber, Reuters
- Jeremy CF Lin, Bloomberg
- Lauren Tierney, The Washington Post
- Joel Eastwood, The Markup
- Agnes Chang, New York Times
- Chris Delisle, ESPN
- Alex Tatusian, Los Angeles Times
- Mara Corbett, The Marshall Project
- Suzette Moyer, The Philadelphia Inquirer
- Allen Tan, ProPublica
This year the Competition Committee was expanded to include 9 people from newsrooms across the country. The committee works on a variety of tasks, including choosing judges and deciding the categories of entry.
The Competition Committee includes: Anna Boone, Star Tribune Digital Designer; Heather Donahue, ESPN.com Creative Director; Brian Gross, Washington Post Deputy Design Director; Stephanie Hays, Washington Post News Designer; Yue Qiu, Bloomberg Graphics Deputy Managing Editor; Mary Freda, City of Crown Point Communications/Media Manager; Simon Scarr, Reuters; Stephanie Redding, American City Business Journals Senior Designer
About the print competition
The Best of Print News Design competition is part of the 44th edition of the Best of News Design Creative Competition. SND invited 27 judges from around the globe to review nearly 2700 entries across 11 categories during four days of judging. The Best of Print News Design competition honors visual storytelling and design for editorial work produced in 2022.
Awards
World’s Best Designed: This is the highest honor that can be awarded to a publication or publications during the SND Creative Competition. The judging panel evaluates publications based on writing, visual storytelling, photography, headlines, use of resources, execution, voice and overall design from three complete editions. This honor is awarded outside of other categories where entries are in consideration for Awards of Excellence, Silver and Gold Medals.
Best in Show: This is the highest honor that can be awarded to a single entry during the SND Creative Competition. All Gold Medal winners are considered for this award at the conclusion of judging. Only one Best in Show may be given and 75 percent of the judging panel must agree in order for a Best in Show to be awarded. This is granted to the best single entry among all categories, apart from entries considered for World’s Best Designed.
Gold Medal: Granted for work that clearly stands out even among Silver Medal winners. It should be nearly impossible to find anything deficient in a gold-winning entry. These entries will define the state of the art.
Silver Medal: Granted for work that rises above excellence. The Silver Medal can be given for work that represents an elevated level of execution, originality of concept or high-end work done with a high degree of difficulty. Even among Award of Excellence winners, these entries should shine.
Award of Excellence: Granted for truly excellent work, going beyond mere technical or aesthetic competency. It honors outstanding entries for such things as being daring and innovative, even if they are less than 100 percent in every respect.
Judges’ Special Recognition: This honor can be awarded by a team of judges or by all judges for work that is outstanding in a particular respect not necessarily singled out by the Award of Excellence, Silver or Gold medals. It has been granted for such things as use of photography, use of informational graphics and use of typography throughout a body of work. This body of work may be a particular publication, a section or section by an individual or staff. The special recognition does not supplant any Award of Excellence, Silver or Gold medal and should be seen as an adjunct.
Judges
A team of 27 judges was selected by the Best of Print News Design Competition Committee to evaluate each entry on how well it accomplishes its editorial and design objectives. SND strives for diversity in judges, who are journalism, new media and design experts from around the world. If judges have any apparent conflicts of interest on particular entries, they will not be assigned to evaluate those entries.
- Tom Fox, Houston Chronicle
- Meredith Sheffer, American City Business Journals
- Molly Bedford, New York Times
- Tim Ball, Politico Europe
- Omar Nashashibi, Arab News
- Stephanie Swearngin, Crain’s Chicago Business
- Luis N. Solano Ortega, Gannett
- Junne Joaquin Alcantara, Washington Post
- Thomas Weyres, Tagesspiegel
- Chrissy Dunleavy, TIME
- Martina Ibáñez-Baldor, Los Angeles Times
- Dian Holton, AARP
- Linda Tran Tutovan, Barron’s Advisor
- Omar Vega, Boston Globe
- Koos Jeremiasse, de Volkskrant
- Mie Brinkmann, Weekendavisen
- Tonia Cowan, Wall Street Journal
- Joseph Hutchinson, Rolling Stone
- Beto Alvarez, Los Angeles Times
- Mary Jane Callister, New York Times
- Liz Hart, The Atlantic
- Alberto Lucas López, National Geographic
- Alexandra Bowman, Whetstone
- Maggie Murphy, Guardian
- Kim Maxwell Vu, Star Tribune
- Andrea Levy, Illustrator
- Hiram Henriquez, University of Miami
About the competition committee
The Best of Print News Design Competition Committee includes 10 journalists from newsrooms across the United States and Canada. The committee oversees the direction of each year’s competition, selecting judges, facilitating the judging and maintaining the call for entries.
Greg Mees of the Star Tribune is Chair of SND Creative Competition’s Best of Print News Design and Allison Hong of the Los Angeles Times is the 44th Best of Print News Design Competition Coordinator.
The Best of Print News Design Competition Committee includes: Tyler Remmel, Washington Post; Adam Rogers, Villages Daily Sun; Shaun Martin, American City Business Journals; Catie Peterson, American City Business Journals; Greg Mees, Star Tribune; Steve Zimmerman, Star Tribune; Josh Jones, Star Tribune; Allison Hong, Los Angeles Times; Nicole Vas, Los Angeles Times; Brad Needham, PMNA
Our volunteers
This year there were 10 volunteers from around the world. They include: Mario Fernando Rodríguez Becerra, El Espectator; Emily Wright, Washington Post; Yan Wu, Washington Post; Aisvarya Chandrasekar, Freelancer; Michelle Bloom, CoinDesk; Micah Fluellen, Los Angeles Times; Stephanie Zhu, San Francisco Chronicle; Rebecca Pazos, The Straits Times; Jessica Brown, Loyola University Chicago; Alyssa Mungcal, The Straits Times.
History of the competition
The annual Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition started in 1979, and the contest was opened to magazines in 2009 as the name changed to the Best of News Design. Since 2002, SND has invited entries from all news sites published anywhere in the world (formerly known as the SNDies) to recognize skill, innovation and high-quality digital journalism.
Recap of SND43
Digital
Last year 21 judges reviewed 1,948 entries from around the world. They awarded 578 Awards of Excellence, 115 Bronze Medals, 24 Silver Medals and 10 Gold Medals.
The New York Times was named the World’s Best-Designed Digital News Experience for coverage of climate change and the Tokyo Olympics. Finalists included Reuters and The Pudding for their organizational portfolios.
SND honored Marco Hernandez, from Reuters, as the World’s Best Designer for his information graphics portfolio. Other finalists for World’s Best Designer included Other finalists for World’s Best Designer included Elizabeth Hart, for her art direction portfolio from The Washington Post and Simon Scarr, for his art direction portfolio from Reuters.
SND also honored four different pieces for Best in Show, one each small, medium and large organization category. The winners were:
- Large organization: How Speed and Distance Dictate How Olympians Run. The New York Times
- Medium organization: The Smoke Comes Every Year. Sugar Companies Say the Air Is Safe. ProPublica
- Small organization: Crime Prediction Software Promised to Be Free of Biases. New Data Shows It Perpetuates Them. The Markup
- Micro organization: How the Taxi Workers Won. Economic Hardship Reporting Project
The 43rd Best of Print News Design competition ended in 2022 with the jury of 27 judges awarding 18 gold medals, 68 silver medals and 798 awards of excellence. No Best in Show was awarded.
DIE ZEIT was named the World’s Best Designed Newspaper. Judges said: “Much like a well-loved book, DIE ZEIT’s purposeful literary presentation invites readers to spend time with its content, without the distraction of competing visual signals. DIE ZEIT’s minimal design choices create a hierarchy executed with simple flawless sophistication, allowing imagery to serve not only as companion to the text, but as a visual conversation on its own. Strong, artful photo edits are a hallmark — effective as dramatic point of entry single photographs or as conversational diptychs that speak directly to each other. So much care and attention is enacted on every page that we could imagine a reader saving an issue to return to through the week. This experience is not ephemeral like digital and it challenges the disposable mentality that has overwhelmed our industry.” The judges named four newspapers as finalists for World’s Best Designed Newspaper.
The top 10 award-winning publications from SND43 were
- The New York Times
- The Washington Post
- Minneapolis Star Tribune
- National Geographic
- Politico Europe
- Los Angeles Times
- South China Morning Post
- The Globe & Mail
- Politiken
- DIE ZEIT