BASF Coatings and the design agency Are We Designer are joint winners of the “red dot award: communication design” for the design of their global automotive color trend book.

The red dot award is a worldwide design awards. More than 6,000 works from 43 countries were submitted in the communication design category alone. The designers at BASF Coatings impressed customers in the automotive industry and the jury with their portrayal of automotive color trends in their trend book.

Every year, BASF Coatings publishes a limited-edition global trend book exclusively for automotive customers. Automotive designers use it as a source of information and inspiration. The trend book describes the social movements and developments researched by the designers. The resulting color trends are illustrated with original coated color samples. This is the seventh time that BASF has collaborated on this book with Cologne, Germany-based design agency Are We Designer.

The challenge with the trend book was not just to portray the complex trends in a comprehensible way and bridge the gap to the associated colors.

“Putting colors and their fine nuances on paper is difficult. The effect of our coatings is based on the interaction of color and the surface it is applied to,” said BASF designer Mark Gutjahr. “Therefore, the color section was completed with individually coated samples that show automotive designers what is possible. On the basis of these suggestions, the specific car colors can be developed in collaboration with the automotive companies.”

“With the red dot award, we have won one of the world’s most important design awards,” said Dr. Wolfgang Reckordt, head of marketing for automotive OEM coatings Europe at BASF. “In 2011, we won the Materialica Design + Technology Award and a prize in the Automotive Brand Contest for our color innovation called XFine. This shows that we are on the right track with our color developments and the way in which we are preparing and illustrating them for the automotive industry.”

The North Rhine-Westphalia Design Center (formerly Industrieform e.V.) has been rewarding outstanding design since 1954. The coveted “red dot” has become established as an internationally recognized seal of quality and is awarded in the three disciplines of product design, design concepts and prototypes and communication design.

In the communication design category, the 15 jurors—international design experts—make their decisions based on criteria such as recognition value, social relevance, target group-oriented approach, originality and aesthetics. The submissions that received the red dot will be on display from October 25 to 28, 2012 in the special exhibition “Design on stage – winners red dot award: communication design 2012” at the Alte Münze in Berlin.