Eye Magazine

Just Add Stock is Eye magazine’s awards project for print or online designs that use stock imagery. Anyone can take part, and it’s free to enter. The awards are for commissioned design work (made since Jan 08) that uses photographs, illustrations and/or film clips from any image library worldwide. There are nine categories: click on the link to download an entry form while there’s still time before the deadline of 31 July 09.

We want to see how designers have responded to the challenge of working without commissioned imagery, and there’s a distinguished panel of judges, including:

Aporva Baxi, creative director, DixonBaxi, London
Pam Bowman, designer and educator, Dust, Sheffield
Tom Hind, director of photography, Getty Images
Mark Reddy, head of art, BBH. London
Deyan Sudjic, director, Design Museum, London

Just Add Stock’s finalists will be published in the Autumn / Fall edition, Eye 73, which is also a photography special issue.

You can follow Just Add Stock on Twitter, http://twitter.com/justaddstock (http://bit.ly/twitstock), where a recent comment says: ‘I hate the use of stock photos.’

Which is what quite a lot of people say, anecdotally.

However @spittingcat goes on to say: ‘but I'm looking forward to having my mind changed by these entries.... fingers crossed.’

See also ‘Awards madness’ and ‘Mad about awards’, in Eye 69. And please tell us your favourite (and least favourite) examples of stock in use – we’re compiling examples from Why Not Associates, Chermayeff & Geismar, Peter Saville, Penguin Books, Bethany Johns, Bureau, etc…