The total pot is 40K€. Once all submissions have been evaluated and scored, the highest ranking participant will win 15K€, the second highest 10K€, and the third 5K€. Additionally, a total of 250€ will be handed out to the top 40 participants, who will also be invited to attend The Awards in Milan. Rankings will be revealed at The Awards. Prize winners will be asked to provide a bank account and the transfers will happen five days after The Awards at the latest.

The ultimate goal is to identify the best 40 works, so we can invite their creators to The Awards, and to rank them, so we can identify the winners of the contest. To do so, we’ll follow a two-phase process. First, a jury of Spooners (i.e., people that work at Bending Spoons) will score each work and pass the top 50 works to the next phase. These 50 works will be scored again by a jury of experts, made up of external judges (described above). To minimize bias, the judges won’t be told the score each work had been assigned during the first phase, and we’ll ask them to score each work without discussing it with the other judges. We’ll then rank the 50 works based solely on the average scores assigned by the judges (we’ll ignore the scores previously assigned by the jury of Spooners, at this point), invite the best 40 to The Awards, and assign prizes accordingly. Both the members of the jury of Spooners and all of the judges will be provided with a list of criteria they should follow, with each criterion weighing as much as the others:

• Usability: your design should be intuitive and usable, so that art doesn’t trump usefulness in the least.
• Creativity: there’s a significant touch of new, different, special, yet the look remains tasteful and modern.
• Polish: technique and attention to detail are just wow.

We promise to do our best to ensure all works will be judged with the minimum amount of bias, as objectively as possible. That said, it’s impossible to eliminate the very substantial element of subjective opinion that goes with any evaluation of design work. So, to avoid unpleasant and useless disputes, do know that our decisions will be unappealable and that we won’t provide the scores or the reasons why a certain work was judged superior to another. If you’re not a good sport, we kindly ask you to refrain from participating 😉. On our part, we give you our word we intend to do the best and most honest job possible.

You can use any tool, as long as you submit your work as a PNG file. More details on the exact format required will be provided in the brief.

The contest won’t require your physical presence and you can submit your solution from January 25, 2019, at 7 p.m. CET (invitation date) to January 27, 2019, at 9 p.m. CET. The winners will be announced during The Awards at the Bending Spoons headquarter in Milan (Corso Como 15), on May 11, 2019 (see schedule below). If you’re among the 40 top-ranked participants and hence you’re invited to attend The Awards, you’ll have a hotel room reserved for the night prior and following the event, so you can avoid travelling at ungodly hours. Taking advantage of the hotel will be optional.

Designflows is completely free for all participants. If you make it to The Awards, Bending Spoons will provide food, hotel accommodation (the night before and after), and will refund all of the travel expenses you’ll bear to attend up to a maximum amount of 250€ per participant (this is on top of the 250€ that every participant attending The Awards will win). If you’re traveling by train or by plane, we’ll book the tickets for you. If you choose to reach us by car, you’ll just be asked to send the related payment receipts via email at info@designflows.it after the event and to provide a bank account for the refund to be carried out (this will happen within five working days after The Awards).

We won’t use your work for any commercial purposes without your prior written consent. However, we’ll have the rights to display all the submitted works within the scope of this contest. For more details, please, read the Rules.

Applications will remain open until January 19, 2019. We reserve the right to close the application window earlier and at any time, in case we receive more applications than we can handle 😱. When applying, you’ll be asked to provide your first and last names, a contact email, and a link to your portfolio (for example, your Dribbble or Behance profile page, but anything goes), which helps us reduce spam and cheating, and gives our recruiting department something to work with! Should any of the provided information look like a joke (for example, if your name is “Obi-Wan Kenobi”), you won’t be invited to take part in the contest.

All participants must either be Italian or live or work in Italy (so foreigners living in Italy or Italians living abroad can apply too). If you’re wondering why, that’s because this event is meant to stimulate and celebrate creative excellence in mobile UI design in Italy, where folks at Bending Spoons believe there’s a huge opportunity to do a lot more in this respect. Although it is not compulsory to be experts in UI design, it’s recommended to have at least some experience within this field. Also, participants have to be at least 18 years old at registration date. We’re going to trust your word with regards to your nationality, residency, and age. However, in case we get suspicious 🧐, we reserve the right to ask for documentation. Granting admission to the contest will be at our sole discretion.

Bending Spoons is a tech company that currently specializes in developing and marketing mobile apps. Our apps are used by tens of millions of people all around the world and get downloaded nearly 300,000 times per day just on iOS, making Bending Spoons the first Italian and European company by that metric globally, and a top 10 among all companies worldwide. We sponsor and organize the event with the purposes of (i) highlighting the beauty of mobile UI design and encouraging its practice in Italy and (ii) making our brand as employer more widely known (we’re hiring!). For more information on Bending Spoons, check out our website, as well as what Spooners say about working here.