CREATIVE AVATAR AWARD - © 2007 BY GIOVANNA GRAUSO - CONCORSO INTERNAZIONALE DI GRAFICA E DESIGN - CATEGORY: CONCORSI DI PROGETTAZIONE GRAFICA NAZIONALI E INTERNAZIONALI

CREATIVE AVATAR AWARD CALL FOR ENTRIES Creative Avatar Award is an international contest which awards a prize to the best avatar for blogs, chat, forum or instant messaging. THE CONTEST The aim of Creative Avatar is to create the biggest international avatar collection, a matchless instrument to get to know the evolution of the graphic design trends and styles in the world beforehand. From one side to the other of the world, there is a community, a blog, a space for virtual meeting, there is an avatar ready to be elected the best avatar in the world by a jury of international experts in graphics and design. The winner will be awarded with a prize money for the sum of 1.000,00 $ and all the avatars being selected will be included in the publication of the book CREATIVE AVATAR AWARD, sole and extraordinary collection on paper of the virtual phenomenon which has forever changed our way of interacting and communicating. Entry to the contest is free, download the announcement of competition and send your work in as soon as possible. WHAT IS AN AVATAR? A real representative icon of the second millennium, an extraordinary concentrate of creativity in a handful of pixels, the avatar remains one of the latest outposts of unbounded creativity. Destined to represent our alter ego in the virtual territory, it is the emblem of a real mass phenomenon, representative of the custom and trends of style, but also political and social ones which characterize the passage from the 20th to the 21st century. avatar The beauty of the net Choosing an avatar means synthetizing in an image a mood, an aspect of the personality, a desired identity. The blog, the forum and the community are the territory in which these images live, narrating different existences often parallel to the real world ones. Far from daily life people who communicate with these means experiment a form of freedom from conditioning which manifests itself in the avatars, destined to represent users’ virtual alter ego, the face which they wish to show to others. A bit of history. The term "avatar" was made popular by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, a novel between science fiction and cyberpunk published in 1992, in which he describes a virtual 3D reality shared on the worldwide optical fibres network, where we can be represented in 3D by our own avatar which allows us to walk freely in bars, shops and trendy places. Avatar, nick, topic An avatar is a simple image and, as such, it can be replaced continuously, it can change according to an event, of the mood, or to the person we are chatting with. There are avatars which come into relationship with the nickname, or in case of instant messenger, with the topic, the phrase or the name which will be viewed by the other users, the so-called “topic”. The avatar’s origins The avatar originates through the manipulation of an existing image, a photomontage, or it can be the result of the fusion between graphics and photos or even just graphics. With a dimension which is generally about 150x150 pixels, it is in every respect the synthesis of a layout. When we view an avatar, the details leave space to the overall view as it happens, for example, for a logo. Creating an avatar means looking for a synthesis at all costs and finding it. It is this ability to tell a story with very few elements that makes them interesting. The Creative Avatar Award was born to award the ability to communicate the complexity of the inner world, to represent oneself through such a small and rich image. COMPETITION The overall winner will be awarded with a prize of 1.000,00 $ The deadline for the acceptance of the works is set for the 30th Novembre 2007. The winner, the finalists and a selection of the best works will be published in the volume CREATIVE AVATAR AWARD. take part in the contest submit your avatar Every communication must be carried out in English The contest is being organized in Italy by " Studio Grauso | P.IVA 04400231215" in compliance with the local laws in force regarding privacy. Please take a look at the report dealing with privacy. By pressing enter, you will declare to have read it and consent to the processing and custody of your data.