Winners of Graphex 2008 are now online and can be viewed at
the Graphex Website.

Graphex 2008 is a national design competition that has been celebrating the best of visual communication in Canada since 1977. The primary goals of Graphex are to promote the value of design to the Canadian public and business community and to create an archive of Canadian design for future generations to study and reflect upon.

Every two years Graphex invites professional communication designers, web designers, typographers, photographers, illustrators, art directors, ad agencies, printers, writers and clients from across Canada to submit their very best published cultural, social and business communications in all mediums. As part of the GDC’s mandate to create an ongoing archive of Canadian design, Graphex 2008 is a national event, open to all Canadians, with discounts given to professional members of design associations such as GDC, RGD Ontario and SGDQ.

All submissions are accompanied by an explanation of the design criteria stating the challenges and requirements of the project and the rationale for the design solution. At the conclusion of the competition phase, a traveling exhibit of the winners tours Canada showcasing the work to the public.

Graphex thrives on learning from and rewarding those designers who are addressing increasingly complex and diverse creative challenges through smart partnerships. It is these partnerships with other media experts that produce communication materials for our clients that are appropriate, effective, thought-provoking, and above all, worthy of being recognized. For judging and exhibit purposes, the awards are broken into a range of mediums with two levels of recognition (Merit and Excellence) given to worthy recipients in each category. These include: Advertising, Annual Reports, Editorial/Magazine, Books, Brochures, Calendars, Catalogues, Logos, Corporate Identity, Stationery, Invitations, Manuals, Multimedia, Websites, Packaging, Posters, Self Promotion, Signage, Environmental, Type Design, and Other.

The theme for Graphex 2008 is built around the theory, structure and visual language of the tournament ladder and the concept of zeitgeist. The graphic language is very much about info-graphics with many items on the left side representing the “input”, or distillation process down to one final selection (the winner or the solution), while the right side represents the winner or solution’s impact on society. The purpose of this theme is to carry the idea throughout all the promotional pieces as a way to not only express aspects of the competition itself (like a tournament), but to educate, inform and inspire that great creative can have a larger impact on society than we often realize.

Go to Graphex 2008 website.