At the 2013 Red Dot awards ceremony, four Taiwanese designers were awarded the "Best of the Best" Red Dot award.
Red Dot initiator and CEO Peter Zec had plenty of opportunity to mention Taiwan at the 2013 Red Doc Communication Design Award ceremony Friday, with four Taiwanese designers receiving "Best of the Best" red dot awards this year.
At the award presentation at Berlin Concert House, Zec said that among 6,812 works from 49 countries competing in 21 categories, only 72 were awarded as the Best of the Best and another 503 won red dot awards.
Every submitted work was strictly evaluated by a 24-member international jury, and fewer than one out of 10 works were awarded prestigious red dots.
The only countries to win more Best of the Best awards than Taiwan were Germany and South Korea.
Of the four Taiwanese Best of the Best winners, two were designed by Asia University: "Endless" in the packing design category and "Illustration for Jiji Thousand Banana Territory" in the illustrations category.
"Endless" is an integrated packing case created for the HTC Sensation XL cell phone and presents the concept of "small phone, big world" through comic illustrations that are revealed when the case is unfolded.
The other work consists of knife-carved illustrations of four folk tales related to bananas grown in mountainous parts of Jiji in central Taiwan.
The other Best of the Best red dot winners from Taiwan came in the packing design category and editorial publishing category.
"Tree in a Bottle," designed by Hair O'right International Corp., is a biodegradable shampoo bottle touted as the world's first shampoo bottle that can grow trees because of Acacia seeds hidden in the container.
"Origami for Environmental Conservation," designed by Shu-Te University, is a set of 20 animals made from folded paper based on unique species in Taroko National Park in Taiwan.
The work comes with an instruction manual on how to fold the paper and an introduction and description of the 20 selected species.
The designer hopes that users of the product will be able to better understand 3D spatial concepts and be more aware of Taiwan's natural environment.