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No Further Fees |
Home > Dates and Fees > Fees > No Further Fees |
Unlike many other design awards and competitions, there are no payments expected from winners; there are no contractually obliged "Further Fees" in A' Design Award, because we believe a designer who come up with superior designs, concepts, architectural works should not be made to pay for extra's to receive the promised real benefits for winning a design award; a winner should be a winner.
Good to Know: First of all, most of the language in this page applies to our Pro Edition Entry; in general when we talk about the A' Design Prize, we talk about Pro Edition Entry, however you will be happy to learn that our no further fees policy indeed also applies to our Digital Edition Entry method as well as Red, Black, Gold and Platinum Entry methods as well; we do not have contractual obligations, legal requirements for further fees or winner packages or contribution fees, our winners are winners and do not have to pay any money to get their work recognized as winners.
What do we want to achieve?
We want to improve design award and competitions landscape: We already managed to lower entry fees for other prestigious design awards, however the further fees are still kept; this creates a problem for us, as designers usually do not discover these "hidden, concealed, or hard-to-see" fees, that are required, thus we decided to share our insights. This is a problem not just for "expensive" design awards in the form of "Further Fees" but also "very cheap" design competitions in terms of "Null Prize".
Is it a Prize or is there a Price?
Currently, we are creating heavy competition for other prestigious design awards and competitions, and our aim is to eliminate "Further Fee" schemas from design award scape totally. This, we believe, will benefit designers, and the society, through subsidization and supporting design, for creating a world with better products, for a better future. The "Further Fee" and "Null Prize" schemas are a problem, both these schemas have, over many years have diluted the meaning of what an "award" means; To "Award" means "to give". We give the "A' Design Prize" to our winners; we do not sell it to "selectees".
Lookout for "Further Fees", "Microtransactions" and the "Null Prize"
Please remember that when you register to other prestigious design awards, you are likely to "agree to purchase winner packages" or "pay further fees" if you win such "awards"; these are contractual obligtions; most of such "awards" do not give you your "award" if you do not pay; we call this schema, this modus operandi "Further Fees" and we are opposing this. Furthermore, we also oppoze the "Null Prize" i.e. cases where you join a so-called "awards" but get absolutely nothing in return except for "now you can call yourself a winner", in "Null Prizes" there are no benefits, no services, no publicity, not even a certificate or yearbook unless you pay; and in some cases not even an invoice. In the end, we are opposing both the "Further Fees" and "Null Prize" and we want to make the public know about these schemas.
A' Design Prize vs Further Fees
No matter how old the awards, "Further Fees", are almost omni present, sometimes called as "obligatory publication contributions" sometimes called "printing fees". Regardless the name, a "Further Fees" means that if you win such other awards, you may be asked to pay up to 17.500 Euros for each design that wins an award to be able to obtain their "complete award or prize", note that what they provide as "complete award or prize" is much different than what we provide in A' Design Prize, and their costs rarely include any tax. A' Design Award & Competition does not have any further fees, we are completely against the "You Win You Pay Schemas", and at A' Design Award, all the winners' services are provided free of charge to our laureates. In the end, you should also consider how your consumers would feel if they learn you paid up to 17.500 euro for your "awards". Decide for yourself? Does this make sense?
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay further fees ranging from 2.820 euros to 5.995 euros. A' Design Award Winners Package is provided free of charge to all A' Design Award Laureates, and includes a significant number of important and relevant services to promote, advertise and disseminate your award-winning work properly. Make sure to check the complete A' Design Prize to understand what we are talking about. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay exhibition fees, that range from 580 to 2900 euros. Exhibition service and exhibition space is provided free of charge to A' Design Awards, that also includes printing of posters or preparation of digital displays and infographics for all those who cannot send their products. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay fees for obtaining the award trophy. Unlike some other awards; not the 1st, 2nd and 3rd place but all laureates are eligible to obtain their trophy. A' Design Award laureates are able to obtain their design award trophies free of charge, most importantly all laureates not just the "designer of the year" or "best team" gets their trophy; every pro-edition winner gets it during gala. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay fees for being included in the yearbook publication, that range from 100 to 1200 euros. You do not have to pay fees to get your book page prepared or paginated; it is free. Yearbook publication service which consists pagination of your page, correcting errors, getting in touch with you to make your page look better, to make images better, and to present you a better page, all provided free of charge to A' Design Awards winners. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay fees to "make it bigger" and have a more prestigious full page spread for up to 2000 euros. All award-winning designers get full page inclusion in our yearbook, because all our winners deserve full recognition, we also check your page carefully so it is printed nicely and we also ask you license and declaration to ensure all included pages are cleared for copyright. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay fees to "make it bigger" and have a more prestigious full page spread for up to 2000 euros. All award-winning designers get full page inclusion in our yearbook, because all our winners deserve full recognition. Pro-edition winners will be given their books free of charge during gala. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not obliged to pay additional fees for "Premium Packages" that cost up to 4.220 euros for advertising, yearbook inclusion etc. Better premium advertising services, press release preparation, distribution, yearbook inclusion, and much more is already provided free of charge to A' Design Award Winners. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay logo usage and licensing fees that are about 1500 euros per year per winning design. You can use both the A' Design Award and Good Design Mark logos, for the whole lifecycle of your product free of charge. Furthermore there are many different logo variants provided for different industries that you can access for free. You can use the logo at as many different mediums as you want. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay additional costs for using the award logo for retail display, in your shops or flagship stores. You can use both the A' Design Award logo, without extra fees at your shop or flagship stores, also your distributers can use the logo as well. There are no limits to how many times you may display the logo. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to further fees before you could even be published as a winner. If you win, you win. Each winner is published online and also included in our yearbook, of course apart from concealed entries that do not wish to be published for pending patents and trade secret considerations. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay 800 to 4000 euros for press release preparation and distribution. Each winner is provided press release package from DesignPRWire, targeting big outlets as well as design related media and journalists, these PR packages and press releases are provided free of charge to all winners. |
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Most design awards would not even bother to translate your entry to 100+ languages, and those who do will be asking a fee per translation, their costs are around 50 euro per entry. A' Design Awards entry fees already include the services for international media communication and therefore any required translations. Winners' get their award winning works translated to major languages to reach further international audiences. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay the participation fee for each participant or team member. The one-time nomination fee is per entry and not for each participant. This is especially convenient for multi-disciplinary, large design teams but also helps young designers or students teams as well. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay the participation fee for each picture or image you submit to the accolades. The one-time nomination fee is per entry and not for each picture. This is especially convenient for designers who wish to submit sets, collections, cluster or group of objects under a single entry. For the same entry fee, you could potentially submit 5 works from the same product family or collection, and upload up to 50 images to support your entry. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay 400 to 1200 euros for the gala-night dinner or participation. Each winner is given an invitation to join our Gala-Night free of charge, and provided networking opportunities. You are not obliged or asked to book a "table" for inflated prices. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay up multiple registration fees to present your work to more competitive design award categories. You only pay the nomination fee once, and then there are no other additional fees, you do not need to make multiple payments to get your work considered in categories that are more competitive. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay hundreds of euro for additional fees for providing jury with digital support materials, videos, pdfs or links to interactive content. When you make an entry,you are able to provide the design award jury with a PDF presentation up to 40 pages, as well as Video File and also you may provide jury with Links to Interactive Content, all free of charge, without any additional fees. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay 200 to 400 euros for the award trophy, the certificate and other material components. Each winner is given the "Physical components package" which is distributed free during the Gala-Night or could be ordered to shipped to you. Digital entrants download their certificate for free. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not asked to pay 500 to 900 euros for "jury presentation fees". You just pay the nomination fee and that's it. We have a free, free, free, fee, free policy. Not only you do not pay "Jury Presentation Fees" you also get free preliminary review when you upload your work; we will check your entry and provide you with honest feedback if it is good for nomination. |
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Unlike other design awards, you are not contractually obliged to pay 100 to 800 euros for the shipment of your winner kit or your design award paraphernalia to your address, we will distribute your winner kit during gala. Each pro-edition winner will receive their winner kit free at the gala-night; those who are not able to join the gala-night can request their winner kit to be shipped to their address by paying a delivery fee, at their sole discretion; no obligations to pay or order winner kits. |
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Unlike other design awards, value added tax is already included in the price, in other awards, you are going to pay up to 20% more fees due to vat surprizes at the end of registration. A' Design Awards entry fees already include VAT, you know what you are paying for in advance. Individuals: Tax is already included in the price. Companies: Tax is included only if you provide us all your company details. We will ask you to provide you your company information if you are representing a company so we could issue proper invoices; if you do not provide your company information, we might have to reflect tax burden on you . |
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Micro Fines and PenaltiesYou Have Full Control. + No fee is obligatory, don't like it, don't pay it. |
Unlike other design awards, instead of disqualifying your entry and burning your whole participation fees for small mistakes, we will instead fine you very small amounts and make required changes ourselves to make your entries compliant with your submission and presentation guidelines as much as we could. We will ask you but not legally oblige you to pay these fines and penalties and you can control what action we should take in case there are issues via our Automated Corrections and Enhancements (ACE) tools and settings to ensure you do not get fined at all, even if the fines are not enforced, you may also completely avoid them. |
Save up to 17.500 Euros by joining A' Design Award instead. |
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A' Design Prize vs Null Prizes A' Design Prize vs Microtransactions |
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| A' Design Prize Don't you think that when you "win" you should really and actually win? You will really win A' Design Prize if you win the A' Design Award, that's because we will provide you all your eligible services without contractual obligations; there are no further fees, there are no obligatory fees; there is only the benefits to enjoy. Check the full A' Design Prize to understand what we are providing to the designers, how our services helps designers, agencies and companies, and how it could help you to promote your products, projects and services, all without any further fees. Finally, if we can organize one of the World's largest design events, gala-nights, multiple international exhibitions, and have one of the largest design award jury ever, why do you think other awards keep charging you for further fees? |
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| Disclaimer: It is our duty to note that we distribute the winners packages during gala-night, and exhibition for free, and they can further be claimed for free from our offices by picking up individually or through a courier, however, we do charge for shipment of the items (such as the trophy, books etc) to the destination countries when ordered by designers,but please understand that package contents are not sold to winners but provided for free, i.e. we are sending these to you, however we will not send them more than one (1) time if your package returns for any reason and we may ask you to pay for a repeat shipment, furthermore we reserve the right to delay shipment or not ship you any items depending on your status and standing with us. Learn any repeat shipment fees here. Furthermore, some of the services listed above are not valid for Digital Edition Participants. However please note that at A’ Design Award, there are potential fines: For example, let’s consider the Gala Night. If you win the award via pro-entry, you are eligible to join the Gala Night or not join the Gala Night as you see fit (Digital Edition winners cannot take part in Gala Night), your award status does not depend on your participation to the Gala Night (unlike some other awards where your participation to Gala Night might affect your outcome – since other design awards sell the gala tickets to all winners, while we provide free of charge up to 2 tickets per entry). So to repeat it, Gala Night is free of charge, in the system at your control panel at Gala Night participation section, you indicate your choice, free of charge, without any obligations, if you do not indicate a choice, you are considered as not participating so no problem at that either. However, If you indicate from the system that you would join the Gala Night, we assign you a call to stage number and if you do not show up at the stage when your number is called, (you can decide not to come and communicate it in advance so we can clear your name from the list, but let’s imagine you confirmed your participation and did not bother to tell us you would not join) then there is a credit fine as we would call your name to stage, wait you in the stage, with all the audience waiting, and that would create a negative outcome for all; if this happens we will add a fine but we will not oblige you to pay it (we might stop some of the services but not oblige any payments in any case), but instead we will add the fine as a negative credit to your account at A’ Design Award. We put these fines to make sure that people respect others, there are several fines like this, for example also for making problems etc, or last minute in-appropriate bookpage changes which could reduce the overall value of the book, etc, but these are all communicated in advance through entry guidelines and the control panel pages where we ask you to interact with the platform. We especially add these fines to ensure that people who got fined do not join next edition, we actually do not care if these are paid or not, but the fines serve to make the platform nicer for all participants by discouraging asocial behaviour, every year we fine only a very little percent for these issues. For example, another fine could be image issues; lets imagine you uploaded your images wrong resolution, and we noticed it last minute when we print the book (we usually send mails for most issues but let’s imagine you ignored the requests to fix the image resolution), then instead of cancelling your award status, or taking your work out of the book, we call a graphic design specialist, and ask them to fix the images; we pay these people by the hour and we ask participants to cover these fees, and like the Gala Night example, we do not oblige participants to make payments, we just do not want them to continue taking part unless they change the way they interact with us, and other laureates. So in summary the fines are valuable for you; imagine you made a mistake and your book page is not printable, we fix it for you, and credit you, mostly issues like these, things that make sense to “fine”, indeed most of these things maybe not even considered as fines, they are merely services that we are obliged to provide to protect your interest without actually taking money from you, we would ask the fines to be paid, but we do not oblige them. Exception to the non-obligation of the fine fees is the wrong account type choices which, in most cases, deliberately made by companies; as you know, professionals pay much less to join the A’ Design Competition, companies are asked to pay more, so some “smart” companies state they are students or professionals when they join the competition, pay the student or professional entrant participation fee, and in the end, we check of course all accounts and if we see these cases of fraudulent behaviour by participants, we first ask them to pay the regular fees and if this is a repeat issue, we fine them big, without any hesitation of any sorts. Hope this statement, provided as part of our transparency policy clarifies what we think about fines; we do not have many fines, we do not oblige most of them to be paid, but if necessary, we also wish to protect the interest of our participants by imposing deterrents. In any case, everything is always clearly noted in the system, and again to note, only a very negligible percentage of the participants ever get fined. | |
The A’ Design Award & Competition, protects your interests. There are no yearly licensing fees or further fees requested from winners, plus the competition takes the necessary steps to help protect your intellectual property and privacy by taking a series of actions to reduce risks in joining design competitions.
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