It was a great honour to be part of the inaugural Verbal Identity jury, and hats off to LIA for being one of the first awards to acknowledge the importance of the category. The Las Vegas resort setting was a wonderful contrast to Eat’s studio in Tokyo and thank you to Barbara and the amazing LIA team for looking after us so well and providing such a professional team to support us with the judging process.
Chris put together a great jury with a very diverse range of backgrounds – naming, linguistics, copy writing – which lead to some intense and highly stimulating days reviewing the work, fuelled by copious quantities of donuts and coffee.
The work submitted was fascinating, all the more so for this being a new category, as we looked to see how specific sub-categories withstood their first real world test.
What I found especially interesting, and relevant to my own work, was when work crossed cultural and language boundaries; so often localisation can suck the life out of great copy and content. Yet here we were looking at submissions that included the localisation of Western brand names into Chinese, where writers were actually adding new layers of meaning through the choice of specific kanji – welcome to the world of phono-semantic matching (Thanks Ben Zimmer). The whole Verbal Identity category can only grow richer in the years to come. I look forward to seeing that happen.
It was a great honour to be part of the inaugural Verbal Identity jury, and hats off to LIA for being one of the first awards to acknowledge the importance of the category. The Las Vegas resort setting was a wonderful contrast to Eat’s studio in Tokyo and thank you to Barbara and the amazing LIA team for looking after us so well and providing such a professional team to support us with the judging process.
Chris put together a great jury with a very diverse range of backgrounds – naming, linguistics, copy writing – which lead to some intense and highly stimulating days reviewing the work, fuelled by copious quantities of donuts and coffee.
The work submitted was fascinating, all the more so for this being a new category, as we looked to see how specific sub-categories withstood their first real world test.
What I found especially interesting, and relevant to my own work, was when work crossed cultural and language boundaries; so often localisation can suck the life out of great copy and content. Yet here we were looking at submissions that included the localisation of Western brand names into Chinese, where writers were actually adding new layers of meaning through the choice of specific kanji – welcome to the world of phono-semantic matching (Thanks Ben Zimmer). The whole Verbal Identity category can only grow richer in the years to come. I look forward to seeing that happen.