August 24, 2025
In the years since winning the contest to design the 2009 Hugo Award base, I have, admittedly ironically, come to strongly advocate against WorldCons running design contests. Why? In a nutshell, because the Hugo committee is very unlikely to get the best designer available, and with whomever is selected, they’re unlikely to get the designer’s best work.
When I learned about Montreál’s base design contest, I had to think long and hard before deciding to try for it. I was not especially happy about contests. I’d entered something similar when I was in college for a contest to design a banner for my home town’s downtown for them to decorate lamp posts during the winter months. I didn’t win, and when I saw what had, it was clear that although they’d said the design could involve up to three colors (to be silkscreened onto the banners), the winning design used only one. Maybe they thought that design was just plain better than my proposal, but I think it was that mine used two, and they’d failed to indicate that cost of production was going to be a major consideration.
You see, with a contest, even if the contest guidelines have a section on “what we’re looking for,” I still have to just guess what the judges really want. If I guess wrong, then I’ve wasted a lot of time. That experience pretty much taught me not to waste my time entering contests like this.
But I decided to make an exception to my “don’t enter design contests” because, well, it was the Hugo Award. So I mulled it over, did sketches, spent time researching materials and techniques, and wrote up a proposal. Now, Montreál said that an actual sample/prototype was optional, but once I had my design, I was not sure that whoever was judging it would really understand what it would look like if they didn’t have an actual example to stare at. There were iridescent components, and dimensionality, and other effects that my experience said people who haven’t worked with those materials often can’t easily imagine.
I no longer recall if I bought the special hammer and chisel for shaping granite in order to make the prototype, or if I just used tools I had around the house, but I certainly had to pay to have the blast pit sandblasted out. I don’t think there was an actual entry fee, but I still had a significant amount of money spent to enter the contest.
And time. And that is why a contest almost guarantees you won’t get work from the best designers. Because they already have people who wil pay them for their time, while a contest, more often than not, is asking to get their time and talent for free.
Imagine running a contest that said “Hey, we want to publish a short story about our restaurant, Milliways. We’re holding a contest; send in your stories and we’ll pick one.” Except that all the stories will belong to the contest people, and none of the stories can ever be sold to another market. No professional writer would ever go near a deal like that. No no, don’t try to tell me that the Hugo contests aren’t insisting on all the rights. With design, it doesn’t matter. A good design is going to be so specific to the situation that the chances of it being re-usable are basically zero. You can’t “file the serial numbers off” of a good design the way you can a short story.
Now, Milliways might get lucky. One of the amateurs who enter the contest might just happen to deliver a great story. That, in a nutshell, is what happened to Montreál. I was told afterwards that the committee only received four entries, and two of those were, well, not very good. Because creating a good Hugo base is hard.
So, if running a contest is insulting to professionals (and it is), and handicaps the designers who do enter the contest (and it does), and might not give the judges all that many options to choose from, then what’s the alternative?
For decades, this is how Hugo bases were made. The committee just found somebody that they knew, usually local, and assigned them the job of making the base. This gives the designer the maximum amount of time to do the work, and lets them work closely with the committee to create something that really resonates with the committee’s vision and desires.
You can have a selection of designers to choose from, reviewing portfolios, before effectively transitioning to Option 1.
The Graphic Artist’s Guild, the professional organisation for graphic artists in the USA, recognizes that there are times when a contest is a reasonable option, as long as it’s the right kind of contest. “Item Three” is the section that applies to non-profits. Note that the initial call for entries is for designers to submit a portfolio of existing work.
The judges pick two or three (“a small number”) of entrants, and asks them to create proposals. At this point, the entrants are being asked to do work for free, but they know they’re on a short list, and, hey, it’s a non-profit organization, so it’s not the insult that it would otherwise be.
The GAG guidelines include a statement that if a for-profit business holds a contest that the prize should be at least equal to the fair market value of the work. They do not, however, make the same requirement for non-profits. As it happens, after I’d presented my work at Montreál, I took my personal display/demo Hugo back to Quiring Monuments so I could show them the final result of what they’d been helping me with for most of the previous nine months. One of the senior managers came out of his office to take a look.
“What did they pay you for this?”
Montreál had specified a budget of $350 per base. About half of that went toward my time doing the work, the rest was the materials.
The manager became almost livid. “What? They should have paid you at least $800 for that!”
Dang! Now, I’m guessing that $800 would include the chrome rocket, which I’m sure is not cheap, so Montreál paid more than $350 per Hugo handed out, but still, that was a surprising and interesting figure. But hey, I knew what the budget was when I entered the contest, and it’s the Hugos. I’m 100% fine with doing the work for less than half the market value. We’ll all volunteers in fandom.
I would, in fact, love to get another chance to design a Hugo base. But I’ve done it once, and almost won a Hugo for my Hugo. I want the next one I do to be the best work I can possibly create, and I cannot do that if I’m entering an over-the-transom contest. I need to be able to talk to the committee and develop my proposal in concert with their desires and interests, in order to deliver my best work. And, I would like to work hand-in-hand with a committee that wants my best work. I might have an idea that we all think is fantastic, but will cost $30/base more than is budgeted. Or I might have three different ideas. I almost certain won’t have time or money to enter three different designs, but if I can just ask the committee, I can quickly find out which one they like best, and work up that prototype first. The committee might have connections to fabrication resources that could be used to lower the cost of manufacture, but I have to know what those resources are, fairly specifically, in order to design a base that can take advantage of them. Some examples could include a metal fab shop, a 3-D resin printer, or a CNC machine, for instance.
I have had it pointed out to me that, since I have already had a chance to make a Hugo base, maybe I shouldn’t get to do another one. Let somebody else have a chance! This is not entirely unreasonable, I will admit. I think if I do ever get invited to do another one, that probably will be “enough,” and afterwards I’ll be entirely happy to have other people doing all that work. If I never get another chance, I can certainly enjoy the Hugo I did create. It would just be nice to create one where I felt empowered to do my best work. Even better is to get to enjoy seeing people receiving Hugos that are somebody’s best work.