ASU Alumni Association brings home 7 awards for writing, design

The ASU Alumni Association recently received four awards in the 26th annual Awards for Publication Excellence (APEX) competition, as well as three awards from the American Inhouse Design Awards.

APEX is an international competition that recognizes outstanding publications from newsletters and magazines to annual reports, brochures and websites. This is the fifth year in a row the Alumni Association has received awards in the APEX competition.

The association received an APEX Award of Excellence for the ASU Magazine layout of “Listening to Mother Nature,” an article on ASU’s research into and utilization of the concept of biomimicry. The layout was produced by a graphic design team including Robert Cao-Ba, art director; Kelly Christiansen, graphic design specialist; and Alexis Peschke, graphic design assistant.

Liz Massey, managing editor for the Alumni Association, was honored along with Matt Hodson, digital media manager, with a Grand Award for their work on ASU Magazine’s online blog. A series of articles that Massey edited for ASU Magazine related to health research and partnerships at ASU – all written by freelance writer Christopher Vaughan – received an Award of Excellence in the Writing Series category.

Massey, Cao-ba and Tracy Scott, ASU Magazine editor-in-chief, received an Award of Excellence for ASU Magazine’s September 2013 issue in the general excellence category for a magazine with more than 32 pages.

Cao-ba’s design team also received three awards from American Inhouse Design Awards from Graphic Design USA, a contest that recognizes organizations and individuals who have demonstrated outstanding work in the field of graphic design across all types of media, including print, collateral, advertising, sales, promotions, logos, Internet and packaging.

The designers were honored for the layout of a March 2013 ASU Magazine story about national security research (“Safe and Sound”), a September 2013 story about flexible display technology (“The Future is Flexible”) and a December 2013 story about ASU’s carbon-neutrality plan (“Getting to Zero”). This was the eighth year in a row that the design team has received recognition from the American Inhouse Design Awards.