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By David Lyman
The competition just sort of happened," says Phil Ritzenberg, SND president from 1980 - 1982.
The organization itself had been cobbled together just a few years earlier by a group of 15 or so designers who had been searching for a forum to share ideas. And woes. Chief among those woes was that the fledgling field of serious newspaper design was still largely unappreciated.
"The papers back then were the ugliest and most chaotic products imaginable," says Ritzenberg. "How a publisher could imagine people were so isolated as to believe that newspapers looked okay is kind of remarkable."
The consensus was that designers needed something to lift their profile, something that would -- publicly, at least -- put them on a par with the writers and photographers who seemed to rule the news world.
They decided a competition was the thing. Americans — this was still a one-nation group back then — love to quantify things. And what quantifies success more simply than prizes? Besides, without some format through which designers could recognize their own successes, how could they expect the rest of the world to take notice?
That first year, a guy named Johnny Maupin got drafted into service to organize the thing.
"Actually, I volunteered for it. It was something that needed doing," says Maupin, who retired from the Louisville Courier Journal after 37 years in 1993. "I had no idea what I was getting into."
Mind you, the numbers back then were nothing like those today. The first competition had a mere 2,474 entries, compared to nearly 13,000 now. The book of winners was a 54-page magazine, quite a contrast to the massive 272-page book that is published now.
But everything was new back then. And completely untested." We had no idea how many entries we would get," says Maupin. "But when everything started coming in, we knew we would have to get organized. Fast."
Maupin and his colleagues borrowed elements from various contests they had participated in over the years. His recollection is that the best-known element of the SND competition — the slotted cups and chips used for voting — was borrowed from Communication Arts.
"What I cannot believe is that they are still doing that," laughs Maupin, who abandoned freelance design in 2000 to spend more time dealing in antiques and collectibles in his hometown of Jeffersonville, Ind.
But in many regards, that is how change has taken place in the competition — slowly and ever-so-cautiously. And, in the case of the most important philosophical element of the competition, it has not changed at all.
"Once we started the judging, we let the judges do what they wanted to," says Maupin. "It was their competition."
For several years, the competition bounced from location to location. Every year, SND counted on someone stepping up with a proposal for a site, complete with scads of volunteers. As the number of entries doubled — and then tripled — finding enough willing volunteers became one of the host organization's greatest obstacles.
In 1989, the competition landed at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. C. Marshall Matlock, the professor who was hosting it on behalf of the School, had made an intriguing proposal to the SND Board.
"We proposed that the competition come here for two years instead of just one," recalls Matlock. "Some people in SND did not think a university could handle such a thing."
But that year, the number of entries climbed to more than 9,000 and to 10,000 the following year.
The massive growth and the demands that came along with it kept other potential sites to a minimum. And SU, with a hefty volunteer pool of students and physical facilities big enough to accommodate the event, was delighted to be at the heart of what was rapidly becoming a very prestigious competition.
A year later, SU agreed to host the competition for another five years at the urging of the SND Board. That was more than a decade ago
While the competition has actually gotten a bit smaller in the past two years — there were more than 14,000 entries in 2000 — the number of participating papers is continuing to grow.
"I find that encouraging," says SND Executive Director Dave Gray. "We need to be looking at stuff and papers we have not been seeing before. You cannot always just be looking at The New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News and Virginian-Pilot. This way, we get to see more — like the nice little 20,000 circulation paper in Idaho that nobody knows about. I think that is probably more healthy."
David Lyman, a reporter at the Detroit (Mich.) Free Press, has more than 18 years of covering a variety of eccentric topics with distinction and style. Reprinted in part from Design # 83, Summer 2002. Design is the official magazine of the SND.
