Italy’s #1 Mobile UI Design Contest

The total prizepool is €40,000. When all submissions have been evaluated, the top 40 participants each win €250, and are invited to attend the Awards in Milan. The top 3 rankings are revealed at the Awards. The highest ranking participant wins €15,000, the second highest wins €10,000, and the third wins €5,000. Prize winners are asked to provide a bank account, and the transfers happen within five working days of the Awards ceremony.

The goal is to identify the best 40 submissions, so we can invite their creators to the Awards. There, we reveal the final rankings, and award the winners accordingly. To do so, we follow a two-phase process. First, a jury of Bending Spoons team members scores each submission and passes the top 50 to the next phase. These 50 submissions are scored again by a jury of experts, composed of external judges. To minimize bias, the judges aren’t told the score each submission received during the first phase, and scoring is done without consulting any of the other judges. We then rank the 50 submissions according to the average scores assigned by the judges, discarding the previous scores of the Bending Spoons jury. We extend an Awards invitation to the top 40, and assign prizes accordingly.

The Bending Spoons jury and all of the judges are provided with a list of criteria to follow, with each criterion carrying equal weight:

• Usability. The design must be intuitive and usable, so that art doesn’t trump usefulness.
• Creativity. There must be a significant flash of the new, the different, the special, while the look remains tasteful and modern.
• Polish. The technique and attention to detail must wow the judges.
• Consistency. Your product show personality, the branding is harmonious and solid.

We vow to ensure all submissions are judged objectively, with the minimum possible amount of individual bias. It’s impossible to eliminate subjective opinion, of course. So, to avoid unpleasant and useless disputes, our decisions are unappealable, and we won’t provide the judges’ scores or the reasons why a certain work is judged superior to another. Please only participate if you promise to be a good sport about it 😉.

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

The contest doesn’t require your physical presence, and you may send your submission from January 24, 2020 at 7pm CET, to January 26, 2020 at 9 pm CET. The winners are announced during the Awards at Bending Spoons HQ, Corso Como 15, Milan, on April 18, 2020 September 12, 2020 (see schedule below). The 40 top-ranked participants are invited to attend the Awards. We provide all travel and accommodation expenses.

Here it is:

Designflows is completely free for all participants. If you qualify for the Awards, Bending Spoons provides food, hotel accommodation (the night of the Awards, and either the night before or after), and refunds all travel expenses up to a maximum amount of €250 per participant. This is on top of the €250 won by every participant attending the Awards. If you’re traveling by train or by plane, we’ll book the tickets for you. If you choose to reach us by car, we ask you to send the related payment receipts via email to info@designflows.it after the event, and to provide a bank account for the refund. Refunds/expenses are paid no more than 5 working days after the Awards.

We don’t use your work for any commercial purposes without your prior written consent. However, we reserve the right to display all submissions within the scope of this contest. For more details, please read the rules.

Applications remain open until 11.59pm on January 22, 2020. You can apply here. 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’re asked to provide your full name, a contact email, and a link to your portfolio (for example, your Dribbble or Behance profile page, but anything suitable works). This 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. Foreigners living in Italy or Italians living abroad are welcome to apply. Designflows is all about stimulating and celebrating creative excellence in mobile UI design in Italy, where folks at Bending Spoons believe there’s a huge opportunity to achieve even more. It’s absolutely not compulsory to be an expert in UI design, though, of course, at least some experience within this field will probably help. Also, participants have to be at least 18 years old at registration date. We’re going to trust your word regarding your nationality, residency, and age. However, if we get suspicious, we reserve the right to ask for documentation. 🧐 Granting admission to the contest is 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 over 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. Playond is a new product of ours: a collection of awesome games available through a single subscription, with no ads or pay-to-win dynamics. We sponsor and organize the contest to make our brand as an employer more widely known (we're hiring!) and to strengthen Playond’s brand too. For more information on Bending Spoons, check out our website, as well as what Spooners say about working here.