Four students of UCO’s Department of Design won top honors at the American Advertising Federation’s annual ADDY Awards banquet in San Diego earlier this month.
UCO design school graduate student Brock Wynn won a gold ADDY award; Alexa Dumas, Lanie Gabbard and international student Masako Tono all won silver ADDYs for their work.
The victories at the ADDY Awards is just one indication of the success of a daring program run by the Design department, led by co-chairs Ruki Ravikumar and Amy Johnson, called “Winner Winner Chicken Dinner.”
According to Ravikumar, WWCD allowed students to submit their work to various design, illustration and advertising contests, and the design department would foot the bill.
“Usually, we have students who just enter (competitions) on their own, but they are quite expensive to enter,” Ravikumar said.
The process behind WWCD is simple.
“If you as a student think you have a shot with a project that you’ve done here at winning an ADDY award, you turn it in to us, the Department of Design. Then the faculty look at the projects,” she said. “If we feel like the project has a shot at winning, then we support the student.”
That includes packaging, mailing, filling out entry forms, and even footing the bill.
“Part of the problem is we really want them to enter competitions, and design competitions are incredibly expensive to enter, even at the student level,” Johnson said.
“We decided that if we created a program called WWCD, in which students who wanted to enter competitions could submit their work to the faculty, and then we could review it and decide if it had a shot, and then based on that we would be able to pay their entry fee.”
Wynn, a graduate student with the Department of Design, was one of the four people who won a national ADDY award. The journey for his project started with WWCD.
“I was probably just surprised,” Wynn said, talking about when he first found out he won the Gold ADDY. “Because you never know what’s going to win, and the stuff you think is really good ends up not winning anything.”
Wynn said the department sent him an email indicating their desire for him to submit his work to competition, but because it wasn’t mandatory, he didn’t jump at the chance immediately.
“I think Ruki, the department chair, said she went ahead and entered my work and it won something, and that’s how it started,” he said.
Through WWCD, the Design Department won approximately 95 awards in several contests at all levels of competition, according to Johnson, marking a success in the program’s first year.
“Money that we have previously put towards advertising, we have redirected for supporting students,” Ravikumar said. “So it’s a two-way process, because it’s free advertising for us, but when they win awards like this, they get hired in seconds.”