2009 awards evening | Winner Illustration - Air Haven (pictured left), Kirsty Mordaunt (pictured with Harry Gration and Chris Nriapa from the BBC)

Brief: This category invites submissions of illustration applied in all its contexts.

We welcome entries that cover a broad range of disciplines and adopt a wide range of skills, tools and techniques. Whether you’re submitting editorial illustration, a graphic novel, illustration for advertising, a record sleeve, a book cover or a children’s book for example, innovative solutions which are sympathetic and relevant to the subject matter will be favoured by the judges.

Providing a strong rationale (description/brief) in support of your entry that clearly explains the purpose and target audience of the piece will assist the judges to better assess your entry.

Prize: Five finalists will be selected from all of the entries in this category. The finalists will be invited to an awards evening where the winner will be announced.

The winner will receive a £1000 cash prize and a chance to become the Maurice Miller Design Champion. Second prize will be awarded £100 and third prize will receive £50.

If you are aged 16-18 your entry will automatically be entered into the Young Northern Designer award. Five finalists from across all of the competition categories will be invited to the awards evening where the winner will be announced. The Young Northern Designer will recieve a £500 cash prize and £250 for their school, college or university. The two runners up will receive a prize of £250 each and £100 for their school, college or university.

Criteria: Entrants should submit their work in PDF or JPEG format. Entrants are invited to supply a single page or series of presentation pages detailing aspects of the piece or project. Students that prefer to submit JPEG image files instead of PDF's are welcome to do so as long as the images are saved in the RGB colour format (not CMYK). The files submitted during the entry process must not exceed A2 size.

Only files that have a .jpeg or .pdf extension will be accepted for submission in this category. Students are advised that the entry system will not allow any other file types to be uploaded so work should be formatted in advance to make sure the entry criteria has been met.

Photographs or imagery that depict completed work in its intended location are welcomed as part of the entry submission and entrants are reminded that images and all text will need to be legible so that the entry can be marked properly.

Important: As part of the entry process, entrants will be asked to submit a rationale (description) for their project. This should be prepared in advance and pasted in to the appropriate box during the submission process. The rationale should include details of the original brief, the process undertaken, the tools and techniques used and a personal reflection on any learning outcomes.

By submitting a well constructed and thorough description of their work, students are likely to do better in the competition because the judges will be able to better understand the purpose of the piece and the student’s interpretation of the original brief. Because of the professional nature of the competition, the judges are likely to favour entries with good use of language and grammar for the project and the rationale.

File requirements: Entrants should ensure that files are submitted in PDF or JPEG formats do not exceed 50MB. For further information and support, please download the competition resource sheet*.

Judge: Frazer Hudson

* Viewing the competition resource sheet will require a PDF reader, to download one for free please click here.