For the past several years, Applied Arts has given the honor of curating the cover and introductory editorial spread of their Advertising and Design Annual to a participating Canadian agency. The brief itself was fairly wide open, with past years having explored themes such as “Luck” and “The Awards Game!”.

We took a different approach for contribution, using the opportunity to conduct an experiment around advertising shows and the jury process itself. Specifically, we set out to see what would happen if regular consumers judged the work in the same way industry professionals do.

So we gathered a cross-section of real consumers and put them through the same process as the industry jury. The experiment became the basis for our editorial contribution and cover design, while a behind the scenes video exposed the industry to the amazing insights our ‘other’ Jury had to offer.

The “Annual inside an Annual” cover concept teased the experiment giving the readers their first glimpse of our consumer jury. Inside, a seven-page feature revealed that on the very same day the entries were being judged by industry peers, a consumer jury was secretly casting their vote too. The curated pages were designed to stand out from the rest of the magazine featuring black pages with gold typography. The ‘X’ graphic derived from the ‘Jury Experiment’ was carried from the cover and throughout the rest of the curated pages.