The first time Things submitted its own work to the Red Dot Design Award, we won.
That sentence sounds like luck. It wasn't. Before founding Things in 2018, we spent more than twenty years across agencies and enterprise teams, earning globally recognized awards along the way: Cannes Lions, Effie, Red Dot among them. We had seen, from the inside, what separates work that wins from work that merely looks like it should. When we finally put the Things name on a submission, we knew exactly what the jury would be looking for. And it had almost nothing to do with what most teams optimize for.
This post is the honest version of that story. Not a victory lap, but a field guide. What Red Dot juries actually evaluate, why award-worthy work starts long before anyone opens a design tool, and what awards genuinely signal to clients (and what they don't).
What Do Red Dot Juries Actually Evaluate?
Short answer: function first. Juries assess whether the design solves a real problem well (through innovation, functionality, formal quality, and clarity), not whether it photographs beautifully.
Red Dot's jury is made up of practicing designers, professors, and industry experts. They have seen tens of thousands of entries. They are immune to spectacle. What they respond to, in our experience, comes down to four things:
Craft
Does the execution hold up under close inspection? Juries zoom in. They notice optical alignment, spacing rhythm, how type behaves at small sizes, whether iconography shares a consistent visual grammar. Craft is the accumulation of hundreds of small decisions made correctly. It cannot be faked in a case study video.
Clarity
Can a juror understand what the product does, who it serves, and why the design decisions were made, all in minutes? If your submission needs a paragraph of explanation for every screen, the design itself has failed at communication. The best work explains itself.
Innovation
Not novelty for its own sake. Juries reward a genuinely better answer to a real problem: a flow that removes steps everyone else assumed were necessary, an interaction model that fits how people actually behave. Incremental-but-meaningful beats radical-but-hollow every time.
Function
Does it work? Red Dot's founding idea is that good design is good business, design in service of use. A product that ships, scales, and survives contact with real users carries a weight that a concept render never will. Fifty-plus shipped products taught us this: the jury can tell the difference between designed and merely rendered.
Why Does Award-Worthy Work Start with Research, Not Aesthetics?
Short answer: because juries evaluate decisions, and research is what makes decisions defensible. Aesthetics without a reason is decoration, and juries have seen enough decoration for a lifetime.
Here is the uncomfortable truth about award-winning UX design: the winning happens in the first two weeks of a project, not the last two.
At Things, every engagement starts with research. Stakeholder interviews. User interviews. Behavioral data where it exists, structured assumptions where it doesn't. Competitive and analogous audits. Not because it looks rigorous in a case study, but because research changes what you build.
Research does three things that directly affect how work performs in front of a jury:
- It defines the actual problem. Most weak submissions solve an imagined problem elegantly. Strong submissions solve a real one, and can articulate it in a sentence.
- It creates constraints. Constraints are where distinctive design comes from. A design shaped by real user limitations, real technical realities, and real business goals has a specificity that generic "best practices" work never achieves. Juries can feel specificity.
- It makes every decision defensible. When a submission explains why (why this hierarchy, why this flow, why this restraint), it reads as intent. Intent is what separates design from styling.
The pattern we saw over two decades of award juries, from Cannes to Essen: the work that wins is the work where nothing is arbitrary.
What Does Craft Discipline Actually Look Like Day to Day?
Short answer: systems, not heroics. Typography with rules, motion with purpose, and consistency enforced by design systems rather than by vigilance.
"Craft" gets romanticized as obsessive individual genius. In a working studio, craft is discipline: repeatable standards applied without exception. Three areas matter most:
Typography
Type carries most of the interface. We treat it as engineering: a defined scale, deliberate line lengths, consistent optical spacing, hierarchy you can perceive before you can read. If a screen works in grayscale with nothing but its type hierarchy, it works. If it needs color and imagery to hold together, it doesn't yet.
Motion
Motion should explain, not perform. Every animation answers a question: where did this come from, where did it go, what changed? Duration and easing follow a system. Anything that exists purely to impress gets cut. Juries, and users, register gratuitous motion as noise within seconds.
Consistency
This is where design systems earn their keep. A component defined once and used everywhere. Tokens instead of hand-picked values. Spacing that follows a grid rather than a mood. Consistency is not a creative limitation; it is what makes the genuinely important moments stand out. We build design systems for our clients for the same reason we build them for ourselves: consistency at scale cannot depend on anyone's memory.
Because we are a studio that both designs and engineers (Design. Code. Mastery.), nothing gets lost between the mockup and the product. The thing the jury sees is the thing users get. That closing of the gap is itself a form of craft.
Isn't "Substance Over Spectacle" the Opposite of Award Strategy?
Short answer: no. It's the paradox at the heart of Red Dot. Work built to impress juries rarely does. Work built to serve users tends to impress them by accident.
Our studio value is blunt: substance over spectacle. We build what works, not what impresses. On the surface, that sounds like a philosophy for losing design awards.
The opposite proved true.
Spectacle is legible as spectacle. Experienced jurors have watched thousands of cinematic case studies with drone shots and swelling music. They have developed the professional equivalent of banner blindness. What cuts through is evidence: a real problem, a clear approach, an execution with no loose threads, a product that shipped and works.
The paradox resolves once you understand what Red Dot rewards. The award exists to identify good design, and good design is, definitionally, design that works. Optimize for the award and you produce spectacle. Optimize for the user and you produce substance. Substance is what wins.
This is why we tell clients: we don't do award-driven design. We do design that happens to win awards. The order matters.
What Do Awards Actually Signal to Clients, and What Don't They?
Short answer: a Red Dot signals verified craft and process maturity. It does not signal that a studio is right for your product. Treat it as a filter, not a decision.
We'll be honest about this, because most award-winning design agency pages aren't.
What a Red Dot legitimately signals:
- Independent verification of craft. An expert jury with no stake in your business examined the work and found it excellent. That's rare, and it's real.
- Process maturity. Winning work almost never comes from chaotic teams. The award is downstream of a discipline clients will feel in every sprint.
- A standard. A studio that has won knows what the ceiling looks like and calibrates against it.
What it does not signal:
- Fit. A jury never evaluated whether a studio understands your market, your users, or your constraints. Only a conversation does that.
- Business results. Red Dot evaluates design quality, not revenue impact. Those usually correlate. They are not the same thing.
- Future performance. An award describes work that was done, under conditions that existed. Your project is a new problem.
Our advice to anyone evaluating a design partner: use awards to build a shortlist, then ignore them. Interrogate process instead. Ask how the studio does research, how decisions get made, who actually does the work, and how design survives the handoff to engineering. The answers predict your outcome far better than a trophy shelf.
How Should You Prepare a Red Dot Submission? Practical Tips
Short answer: submit real work, lead with the problem, show the reasoning, and edit ruthlessly.
If you're preparing a submission, here is what twenty-plus years around award juries taught us:
- Submit shipped work. Live products carry evidentiary weight that concepts don't. Reality is persuasive.
- Lead with the problem, not the solution. One or two sentences on what was broken and for whom. Every subsequent decision now has context.
- Show reasoning, not just results. A before/after, a rejected direction, a constraint that shaped the outcome. Juries reward visible thinking.
- Respect the jury's time. Assume minutes, not hours. Front-load the strongest material. Cut everything that doesn't argue your case.
- Sweat the submission's own craft. Your entry materials are design work. Sloppy image compression or inconsistent type in a submission quietly contradicts every claim it makes.
- Choose the right category. Misfiled work gets judged against the wrong criteria. Read category definitions carefully before entering.
- Only submit work you'd defend in person. If you wouldn't confidently walk a jury through every decision, it isn't ready. That test alone will filter your entries better than any tactic.
FAQ
What is the Red Dot Design Award?
The Red Dot Design Award is one of the world's most established design competitions, judged by an international jury of design experts. It recognizes outstanding design quality across products, brands, communication, and design concepts, with the Red Dot label widely recognized as a mark of verified design excellence.
How hard is it to win a Red Dot award?
Red Dot receives thousands of entries across its competitions each year, and every entry is assessed by an expert jury against criteria including innovation, functionality, formal quality, and durability of the solution. Winning requires work that survives close professional inspection, not just an appealing presentation.
Does winning a Red Dot mean an agency is the right choice for my project?
Not by itself. An award verifies craft and process maturity, but it can't verify fit with your market, users, or constraints. Use awards to shortlist studios, then evaluate their research process, their team, and how their design work survives engineering handoff.
What matters more for winning: visual polish or research?
Both, but research comes first. Juries evaluate whether design decisions are justified, and research is what makes decisions defensible. Polish without reasoning reads as decoration; reasoning expressed through polish reads as design.
Can a small studio win a Red Dot against large agencies?
Yes. Juries evaluate the work, not the org chart. A small, craft-obsessed team with a rigorous process competes on equal footing; Things won on its first submission as an independent studio. Focus, not headcount, is the advantage.
Work with a Red Dot–Winning Studio
Things is a digital design and engineering studio (a studio, not an agency) founded in 2018, working from Istanbul and Elazığ with leading brands in Turkey and worldwide. Research, UX/UI design, design systems, engineering, and AI-augmented workflows. Fifty-plus products shipped. One standard for all of them.
If you're building something that deserves that standard, write to us: hello@things.ist
Substance over spectacle. It's how we work, and, as it turns out, how you win.