The Awards Design Diary #5: Pulling It All Together

This will be the last Design Diary for The Awards 2026 before we actually get off the ground, and it's mostly an excuse to share our INCREDIBLE new visual identity by Jack Panic of DNGN CLUB. When I approached him a few months ago about making the banner, logo, and winner's badges for The Awards 2026, I told him that I wanted them to "feel retro, shooting for grainier 80s/90s/00s aesthetics over polished 50s/60s nostalgia" and oh my gosh did he deliver.

It's grainy. It's colorful. It sort of feels like it's a little out of focus and you can't quite trust your eyes. So it's perfect!

With The Awards 2026 officially beginning on April 1st, I just wanted to pull together everything I've been talking about and noodling on. Starting with judges!

Judges

The Awards 2026 is looking for 12 judges, at least 50% of which will be POC and 50% of which will be of marginalized genders. If we don't get enough applicants to make that happen at first, then we'll keep applications open until we do. To demonstrate our commitment to this, for the first time we will be making our judges' identities known once they have been chosen.

These judges will each be assigned ~2/3 of the eventual submissions to read through and vote on (though they can of course read all of them, and are encouraged to do so). This process will happen over the course of 3 months, from June-August. Once all votes are in, ~50 finalists will be chosen and judges will be added to a shared Discord server where they can discuss their thoughts. Over the course of the next 6-8 weeks (September-October), they will develop their ideas about what should become a recipient of An Award and eventually vote on the winners.

Finally, they will appear in a livestream (as they are able) in late October/early November announcing the winners of The Awards 2026 and share their reasons as to why each of the 20 winners were deemed as such.

Submissions

Submissions to The Awards 2026 must adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Be published between June 1, 2024 and May 31, 2025.
2. No AI or LLM was used to generate any part of the submission (writing, art, video, voice, etc.)
3. Did not raise over $100,000 in any crowdfunding campaign

Beyond this, each submitter is limited to 2 submissions of 50 pages of material, whichever limitation comes first. Judges are not obligated to read more than 50 pages of material per submitter.

A submitter is here defined as the primary designer of the work submitted, so it is possible that individual people could appear on more than 2 submissions. So long as nothing is submitted in a way that seems intended to specifically subvert the submission limits, this is allowed.

All material tangentially connected to TTRPGs is eligible for submission: original systems, hacks of existing systems, adventures, supplements, video essays, podcasts, artwork, etc. It is up to the judges to decide how best to evaluate these disparate mediums against each other.

All submitters will be invited to contribute their submissions to a winner's package, wherein the 20 winners of The Awards 2026 will receive digital copies of all opted-in submissions. The decision to contribute submissions to this package will not be shared with the judges, and thus will not impact their deliberation in any way.

All submitters will be notified whether or not their submission(s) were voted as finalists, though this information will not be shared publicly. This is primarily to let people know whether to tune in to the winner announcement livestream, as well as a chance to gather information about who to credit in the event of their winning and how to pronounce winners' names.