The White Box Contest 2011
In early May 2011 Guylian invited designers and chocolate fans around the world to design a completely new look for its famous Belgian chocolate Sea Shells gift box. We received an amazing 221 entries from 30 countries around the world, of which many were really excellent. We would like to express a big thank you to all online voters as well as entrants as we had a total of over 30.000 gallery votes.
We’re proud to announce our 3 winners here:
1. Grand prize winner: Stefanos Michaelides (Greece)
This 34 year old Greek designer and illustrator used the unique marbled look of Guylian’s seashell chocolates as his inspiration; white, milk and dark chocolate are delicately melting down towards our iconic Seahorse.
“The design brings luxury and warmth; it’s exceptionally stylish and fully fits with Guylian’s international brand image”, commented our professional jury. “Our sincere congratulations and thank you to Stefanos.”
The entry was also much appreciated by our Guylian community as it collected 1,187 online votes.
The grand prize is USD 5,000 and worldwide fame as Guylian will now study to bring this new packaging to market around the world mid next year.
2. Second prize winner: Larazel dela Peña (Philippines)
Our first runner-up, winning USD 1,000 design software, is Larazel dela Peña from the Philippines.
This was by far the most popular entry with our online voters as Larazel collected 4,448 votes.
She commented on her entry: “I’m definitely a chocolate lover … I’m so happy to have the chance to redesign the packaging of Guylian Belgian Chocolates…. Let’s make the world crave chocolates!”
3. Third prize winner: Fatma Cakir (Turkey)
Fatma Cakir, a 35 year old professional sculptress, is our second runner-up winning an I-Pad. She transformed the waves of the sea into stylish curls, embracing the logo and our chocolate seahorse.
The jury commented that “this design is very elegant and modern, uplifting the iconic seahorse. The white curls beautifully decorate the warm brown background making this box very attractive and eye-catching”.
Selection procedure
The winners were selected by a combination of online public voting and a professional jury’s selection. Voting and jury’s points were of equal weight.
The 10 entries with the most votes were considered for the voting shortlist in which points were granted from 10 for the most popular design, until 1 point for the last one in this top 10. All 6 jury members compiled a shortlist with their top 10 of most favourite designs. We summarized this into one jury’s shortlist in which the number 1 was given 10 points, the second one 9 and so on until 1 point for the 10th design.
The final ranking was made through a sum of both voting and jury rankings. The winning designs are the three designs with the highest number of points out of 20.
The grand prize winning design collected 12 points (10 from the jury, 2 from the voting). The second prize winning design had 10 points (10 from the voting, 0 from the jury). The third winner ended with 9 points (9 from jury, 0 from the jury).