2006 Adobe Design Achievement Awards

Environmental Graphics and Packaging: Winner

Amy Wang

School of Visual Arts

Ametrica!

Biography: Amy Wang measures her fevers in Celsius, a remnant of her childhood in Taiwan and the Dominican Republic. Since moving to New York, she has become quite at home in inches and pounds, but nowadays stumbles in ordinary conversation with her friends, who are from around the world. Her disgruntlement is further aggravated by her undergraduate experience — she studied biology at Harvard University, conducting research in metric units. As a former science and current design student (Amy received her MFA this spring from SVA), an American as well as an immigrant, Amy cannot help being utterly drawn to the "Ametrica!" project.

Objective: "Ametrica!" is an awareness campaign to help convert the United States to the metric system. No one thinks about an act as routine as measuring, much less the impact it can have on education, economy, and health. Through bold numbers and subtle humor, viewers are initially invited to interact with the pieces and their environment such that they experience metric units directly, rather than through comparison with customary units (which perpetuates the problem of dependency on the old units). Those intrigued by the issue are then directed to visit the Ametrica! website for more information, interactive components, and motion graphics experiences.

Tools used: The campaign is typographically and specifically number-driven, so Adobe® Illustrator® provided the means to create the essence of the campaign. To communicate the way these pieces work in the environment, Adobe Photoshop® allowed for still-image representations. Finally, Adobe Acrobat® came in handy for transferring these files in a format that would be universally acceptable.

Back to 2006 Adobe Design Achievement Awards winners.