Fresh 18
Fresh Future is a brand-new global initiative to discover and celebrate outstanding creative talent, showcasing the work of more than 200 creatives. With each year we’re building a significant, permanent record of the culture we live in. This is how we put together a state of the art platform to nurture and reward creativity.
Recognising the need for a new way of supporting and championing creative and artistic thought, we identified a way to use our platform and resources to uncover and shine a light on incredible creative talent.
Through our creativity we make sense of our world. Our capacity to create thrives when there are no boundaries, no borders and no limits. It is inclusive and diverse, it is individual and cultural, it is local and global but most of all it is free to everyone.
We built Fresh to realize and nurture a new way to reward creativity. Part 1 of our feature follows our path to building and launching the initiative.
Against Isolationism
August 2017 - January 2018
With eyes locked on the year ahead, Fabrik turns to its own community of creatives and artists to predict the upcoming uncertainties and opportunities of the next 12 months.
The team reached out through their own networks to creatives all over the world. The result was a hand-picked global panel of 114 creative leaders and curators that established the most prolific judges reviewing team ever assembled for a free awards showcase.
The Fabrik team build out the structure for the awards showcase, defining 30 categories across the creative industries and developing the core values of the awards showcase. The initial Fresh site goes live to introduce the initiative. Speaking of the showcase, Fabrik's CEO, Tim Jarvis says:
"We believe creative work should be awarded based on its capacity to inspire and energise the community and the cultures we’re all part of, and not based on client and agency budgets."
The Fresh 18 Call for Entries invitation goes out, encouraging creatives from all backgrounds, cultures and disciplines - at every stage of their careers - to submit work they've created in 2017. Free to enter and open to everyone contributing to the creative industries, Fresh 18 is a call to empower the visionaries, a believe that creativity aspires hope and an opportunity to shape the future.
Advocates For The New
To thank our judging panel for their time and energy in reviewing the entries and for spreading the word Tim created a personalised screenprinted poster for each judge with illustrator and photographer Joseph Gibson. The A2 posters were printed on a pearlescent paper stock from G.F Smith Papers and printed with pearlescent inks at Print Club in Dalston, London.
Discovering Talent
February 2018 - March 2018
As the call for entries period moves on Tim and Phil are working on the design and build of a reviewing platform to allow the judges access to all the entries to score them.
The Fresh 18 Call for Entries closes with over 1600 approved entries. Our shortlist judging panel begins to review the entries. Shortlist judges are encouraged to review submitted entires across all categories, including creative fields that they don't specialise in.
Judging the Entries
Entries are scored on five criteria; originality, freshness, inspiration, context and craft. When judging is complete the criteria scores are averaged for each entry, and Fresh's internal multiplier is applied - which weights the five criteria independently. Scores for the criteria are then combined, resulting in a single score for each entry. The entry is then measured against the other entries within it's category. Each entry is reviewed on average 26 times during the reviewing period.
Each category can only have one gold, silver and bronze winner unless two entries carry exactly the same score; in which case they'll both carry the highest award their score allows. Entries can score up to a total of 275 points. An entry needs to reach a score higher than 225 to be eligible for gold, 200 to be eligible for silver and 175 to be eligible for a bronze or carbon award.
Eligibility tiers mean that sometimes a category may not have a gold winner, which helps ensure a standard of quality across the entire showcase. A piece of work that would be graded silver in one category couldn't win gold in another.
Fresh was set up to be as inclusive and as transparent as possible, so we published an in-depth look at the creative categories; examining the scores of winning entries in a quantitative analysis session that reveals that both scale and quality play a role: All Categories Are Not Equal
The Curator Team
During this period the most active judges are invited to become curators, who will help the Fresh team form insights into the ideas and concepts expressed across the entire catalogue of entries - not just the winners - in a series of free-form editorial articles.
The judging site is retired, and in it's place we built a curators site, enabling our curator team to browse and filter through the entire entry pool to pave the way for the Insight articles.
As our curators confirm their inclusion, the Fresh winners submit their extended entry content and our Best in Book winners are confirmed for film, photography, design, motion & 3D, art and fashion.
The Awards
April 2018 - May 2018
The inaugural Fresh awards showcase nets 196 winning entries across 28 categories, with 19 gold winners, 29 silver winners, 27 bronze winners. Each gold, silver and bronze winner is invited to join the Fabrik community with a free portfolio website for two years. A further 121 entries each scored enough to receive a carbon award from more than 1600 approved entries.
During May the Fresh 18 awards go live with a platform that allows us to build new creative partnerships and to generate new ways of empowering and celebrating creativity. Gold, silver and bronze winners receive personalised posters, honouring their work and their place in the Class of 18. The Insight programme is established to continue over summer and autumn with explorations, ideas and concepts from across the Fresh 18 entries pool.
Collective Of The New
For the gold, silver and bronze winners, Tim created a series of screenprinted posters with Alasdair Manson from London's Manson's Press. Using a unique spot-UV varnish on metallic G.F Smith paper, the A2 posters followed the styling of the judges posters and featured the winning entrants by name, and category won.
June 2018 - December 2018
As the posters make their way over to our winners the Fabrik team are working hard on the first Insight article.
As well as publishing the winning entries, the Fresh initiative is designed to showcase important and forthcoming trends both within the creative industries, and in the way our cultures generate and consume creativity. This is the true value of the initiative: our curator team helps us form insights, ideas and concepts from the entire pool of entries - not just the winners - in a series of free-form editorial articles.
With each dip back into the entries pool we're able to discover new work and extend the Fresh categories with Curator Series entries. These entries, when viewed together, form a snapshot of creativity in 2018 and allow our curator team to highlight work they deem to be important or relevant to the culture we live in.
From simple beginnings with clear objectives
We believe in transparency and simplicity. We believe that those who make and shape our world should take responsibility for the way it impacts society.
This is an ambitious project but the message is simple; we're levelling the playing field. Creativity has no boundaries, no borders and no gender. Fresh is a new start. We see only craft and creativity. Free to all, it's global and it has never been more important. Fresh is a call to arms for all creatives to thrive and a message of acceptance for all.
