Cincinnati Design Awards

Celebrating the best in built environment design by Cincinnati-area creative firms

Submit

Enter the Cincinnati Design Awards and showcase your best design work! Projects completed within the past five years in the disciplines of architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and experiential graphic design are all eligible for consideration. The tabs below contain templates, complete program requirements, and contact information in case you have any questions or problems with your entry submission.

After you have read all the information in the tabs below and have your checklist items ready to submit, use the buttons below to either register as a new entrant or log in to your existing CDA account to manage your entries or purchase new ones. Good Luck to all CDA entrants!

Thanks, see you next year.

Please record your username and login password for your company to use in the future! You will be able to save and edit your entries right up until the submission deadline using your login credentials. And you will be able to resubmit them in subsequent years if they do not win an award when first submitted (up to five years from project completion date).

2018 Important Dates
  • Call for Entries details and PowerPoint template online Friday August 10th, 2018.
  • Online awards submission system opens Friday September 14th, 2018
  • This year’s entry deadline will be Friday October 26th 2018 at 5:00 pm EST. The online website will automatically shut off at this time and no late entries will be accepted.
  • The awards banquet will be held on Friday November 9th 2018 at the Memorial Hall at 1225 Elm Street, Cincinnati 45202 from 6:00–9:00 pm. Banquet reservations are required.
  • To be eligible for the 2018 CDA program, projects must have been completed no earlier than October 20th, 2013.
Contacts

Checklist

So you are prepared to submit your entry online, please gather the following information about your project before starting the online process!

  • Complete your 4-slide PowerPoint banquet file BEFORE starting the online submission to save time! You can download the template below. The judges do not see this slideshow! This slideshow is only used to show the audience the project while the jury explains its comments during the banquet. You can lay out the slides however you wish as long as it fits in 4 slides and does not include any video (can cause playback issues during event with unknown video hardware in use).
  • Prepare no more than 15 JPEG images to upload for the jury to review. They can include any combination of photos and drawings. They must be in JPEG format and be no more than 2000 pixels in either width or height.
  • Project title, location, and completion date. Make sure you edit the TITLE at the very top of the online entry form to be your project’s title so it appears correctly on the website.
  • Project team company and individual names you would like to recognize.
  • Contractor(s) and Photographer names and company website URL addresses (important! – the URL’s will become links on the CDA website).
  • Project narrative (1500 characters max = about 200 words.)
Template

NOTE: You no longer need to submit a complete PowerPoint with all project photos! You will instead upload 15 separate JPEG images and a short, 4-slide PowerPoint show that will only be shown at the banquet in the event your project wins an award. (The jury will not view the PowerPoint files you submit. They will only review the separate JPEG images you upload.)

Download PPT Template
Resubmitting past projects

In order to resubmit projects from a previous year’s CDA program that did not yet win an award, you need to purchase a “new”entry for that project.

But you must be logged with your company’s existing user profile. Do NOT create a new user account or the old project will not show up in your entries list! If you no longer have your login information for an existing account, please email the CDA webmaster for a reset password.

Once you have purchased the total number of entries you wish to enter for the current year, you will see that number of Untitled entries in your list. You will, however, not need all of them.

To complete your entries, you will edit the entries for the new projects only.

Then, you need to email a list to the CDA webmaster of the existing project titles from a past CDA year that you wish to resubmit. The entry date for those projects will then be updated to the current year so that they are entered in the current judging pool. (The extra Untitled entries that you do not need will also be deleted by the webmaster.)

NOTE: we are currently working to incorporate the resubmission of old projects into the entry purchase checkout process in future years. For now, this workaround is the easiest solution so entrants don’t have to cut and paste text from old entries and upload images again.

The CDA program

The Cincinnati Design Awards (CDA) promote the best in environmental design by Cincinnati-area creative firms. It is the goal of this program to recognize local and regional designers and design firms for their outstanding work in the community and also to educate the general public to the benefits of supporting quality design. Each year, the Cincinnati Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA Cincinnati), the International Interior Design Association (IIDA) Cincinnati/Dayton City Center, the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) Cincinnati/Dayton, the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD) Cincinnati Chapter and the Miami Section of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) invite their members to present their best work in their respective annual design competitions. All entries will be judged by a common jury of distinguished guests connected to all facets of the design profession. The awards are announced at the annual CDA banquet with a panel of guest jurors.

2018 Categories
  • Building Architecture: projects submitted tthis category may include New Construction, Adaptive Reuse, Preservation, Additions, Urban Design and are evaluated against peer projects of a similar scale
    • Large Scale = >10,000 sf
    • Small Scale = <10,000 sf
  • Interior Architecture: projects submitted tthis category may include New Construction and Renovation of Interior Projects
    • Large Scale = >5,000 sf 
    • Small Scale = <5,000 sf
  • Landscape Architecture: projects submitted tthis category may include Residential, Parks, Urban Design, Campuses; Streetscape, Hospitality, Landscape Art, Interior Landscapes, Gardens, Green/Blue Infrastructure, Green Roofs, Trails & Recreation
    • Large Scale = >5 acres
    • Small Scale = <5 acres
  • Experiential Graphics: projects submitted tthis category may include Wayfinding, Branded Environments, Placemaking, Interactive Experiences, Exhibition Design, Individual Signs
    • Large scale = environments or systems
    • Small Scale = features or elements

Note: The number of awards in any category is subject to the discretion of the jury. The jury also has the right not to award any projects in any given category in any given year if the work is not deemed of sufficient quality.

Eligibility
  • Projects must have been completed within five calendar years of the CDA submission deadline each year.
  • The submitting firm must have a local office actively involved in the project.
  • The submitting firm must be the Design of Record, responsible for the overall design of the project concept.
  • Submissions by design teams and joint ventures shall be eligible for the member fee only when the Designer of Record is a local member.
  • Non-members may submit at a non-member rate.
2018 Entry Fees

AIA / IIDA / ASID / ASLA
Member entries: $150
Non-member entries: $300

SEGD
Member and Non-member entries: $100
Single sign entries: $50

2018 CDA Jurors

AIA:  Mark Sexton, FAIA
Krueck and Sexton Architects – Chicago, IL

 

IIDA/ASID: Sandy Gordon, FASID
Sandy Gordon Interiors – Madison, WI

 

SEGD: Bryan Meszaros
OpenEye Global – New York, NY

 

ASLA: Mark Dawson, FASLA
Sasaki Associates, Inc – Boston, MA

 

Local Juror:  Eric Avner
People’s Liberty – Cincinnati, OH