Review: MAZ (Marketers Association of Zimbabwe) Exceptional Marketing Awards. Part 1
Before I start the review, please bear with me, this is not any kind of personal attack on the awards or the awarded but a pure objective analysis on some of the entries and winners of the Exceptional Marketing Awards.
The Exceptional Marketing Awards, were introduced by the Marketers Association of Zimbabwe, (MAZ) in 2012, to encourage and celebrate excellence and innovation across the marketing process within the business spectrum. These awards recognise organisations and people who have achieved outstanding success in their planning and implementation of marketing and related areas strategies, annually.
Right! This year’s awards were held on the 1st of November & this was actually my first time following up on these awards. The winners in some categories actually shocked me and it’s one of the driving factors that drove me to write this review. I’m not going to talk much about the nitty gritty bits of marketing but rather stress more on the design aspects of some winning work. This means I’ll not touch on all categories but only those where design plays a significant role like Website Design, Print Ads, Outdoor Media Ads, and Social Media & Digital Campaign. This first post is only going to be an thorough analysis of the Best Website Design winner.
Let’s get straight to it:
Best Website Design: Amtec (company in the automotive & engineering business)
Shocker! Website of the year? Haha no offense but this raises a lot of questions about the criteria used to judge this. Let’s break it down shall we
Positive first. The site is simple, the designers definitely maintained some sort of simplicity but that’s just about it. From UI/UX design point of view, this site is terribly designed. First things first, the company logo (Not going to review the logo itself as that would require a post or two) is conflicting with some site content which makes the copy on the hero image not legible. What’s the point of the copy if it’s not legible? Amateur mistake. The designers of the site should have acquired a white version of the logo which would have worked perfectly on the dark background in place of those huge social media icons.
Another astonishing discovery is the fact that the site colors are predominantly black, white, and yellow/gold yet the brand colors are white, red & blue…funny huh? Poor branding. It’s like the website is entirely a different entity that exists within it’s own universe, I really wonder if such things were taken into consideration when adjudicating.
Let’s take a look at another page:
The same problem seems to be repeated over and over throughout the site. The humongous logo blocking the site content & copy. Something new? The cropped out copy on the image. The image is beautiful yes, but the copy is cropped out which renders it useless. I suspect stock imagery was used, designers should have resized the image to fit the site size or created something from scratch.
The worst part of the site design must be the chatbot prompt design. The color is a bit off, the green is too extreme for the existing color palette (although that might play out as an advantage). What put me off in the worst possible way is the typography. The bulky rounded typeface coupled with the outline, why? Okay, I get it, maybe they were trying to depict the idea of friendliness (since it’s a chatbot) but there are better more efficient ways to go about it eg using a clean legible typeface while utilizing good copy writing to evoke the feeling of friendliness.
On to site responsiveness. How does it respond to changing environments? ie how does it look on a mobile device, monitor, iPad etc Basically it’s how the site looks on different screens, which is a huge factor in this digital age where sites are accessed via various mediums. The result was not surprising at all.
The site was not well optimized for mobile screens, well maybe according to my phone only. The alignment and hierarchy on the homepage seems to be completely out of touch with the logo center aligned while the rest of the buttons are somewhat aligned to the right side and the hamburger menu in isolation on the left side. As you scroll down the site, one will notice that the copy is also overlapping, making the text barely readable. On the third screenshot, on the extreme right, the text looks well aligned and the images are doing justice (though again stock photos pose problems of their own in regards to branding).
This is probably going to offend a couple of people but that’s fine, like the great Massimo Vignelli said, “the life of a designer is a life of fight: fight against the ugliness.” It’s mind boggling to see such designs winning awards, not saying Amtec didn’t deserve the award, but it raises a lot of questions on the integrity & credibility of the awards themselves and to a greater extent, the state of the Zimbabwean creative industry.
Thank you for reading. Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
