In Romania, design is a young profession — younger than most people assume.

There was a visual culture here before anyone called it that. In the early twentieth century, Romanian magazines were already looking West — borrowing layout and photographic reportage from the illustrated press of Paris, Berlin and London, mixing that modernity with folk motifs and local subject matter, in the ordinary way a culture negotiates who it wants to become. That thread didn't survive intact. From 1947, printed matter became something closer to a state tool: paper was scarce, layouts were compressed until they left almost no room for a reader to think for themselves, and the loudest visual instinct in the country belonged to the regime.

Design, as a discipline with its own name, arrived late into that picture, and by accident of timing. Bucharest's fine arts school is old — founded in 1864 as the National School of Fine Arts (Școala Națională de Belle-Arte ), renamed several times over the following century — Academy of Fine Arts, 1931, "Nicolae Grigorescu" Institute of Fine Arts, 1950, Art Academy, 1990 — before becoming, in 2001, the National University of Arts it still is today.

But it did not include design education until 1969, when a small department, the Department of Industrial Forms, was founded within the Faculty of Decorative Arts. Three people built it: architect Paul Bortnowski, who led it for its first five years, and painters Ion Bitzan and Vladimir Șetran, who carried it for decades afterward.

What made it worth building was the ambition behind it: to bring Bauhaus-style thinking — rational, industrial, form following function — into an Eastern Bloc country, in a genuinely difficult political period, rather than looking to the Soviet design institutes that would have been the expected model. The word "design" itself only entered everyday Romanian vocabulary in 1974. What the first graduates of that department walked into afterward was still murky: no clear professional category was waiting for them, and they were placed into factories, ministries and industrial research institutes wherever "designers" were technically needed, without much agreement on what the job actually was.

Then came 1989 — the year of the Revolution — and a different kind of disruption at the level of the wider profession: not scarcity this time, but chaos. Borders opened, presses started again, and a country hungry for anything Western spent its first free years copying what came from outside, often without asking why it looked the way it did. Advertising agencies filled the vacuum and absorbed almost everything: branding, packaging, posters, books. Editorial design in particular shrank down to the cover — the rest of the book stopped being anyone's design problem. Most graduates of the graphic design program went into advertising, because that's where the work and the money were, and largely still are. A handful of independent studios and freelancers kept the discipline alive on its own terms; many of them don't exist anymore, or left.

The department itself kept changing shape through all of this. In the early 1990s it was renamed the Design Department. By the early 2000s it had split into three separate specializations — Industrial, Graphic and Ambient — the same moment the school moved from a four-year program to the Bologna 3+2 system.

The profession is still catching up to its own reality. "Graphic designer" was only added to Romania's official occupational nomenclature in 2011 — the government's own list of recognized jobs didn't have a name for what these people did until then. There have been several attempts over the years to unite the profession under one association, and a few attempts at national competitions before this one — none of them lasted. Right now, Local Design Circle is the most active and longest-running association working toward that goal: building the education, community and shared standards the profession never had the chance to develop on its own.

Most of the friction in this field isn't about expertise, it's about trust. Visual literacy is still uneven here, and that goes for clients as much as the general public — a lot of people simply don't have a clear sense of what graphic design is, or what a graphic designer actually does. So a good working relationship often comes down to two things: how much courage a client has to trust someone whose decisions they don't fully understand yet, and how much the designer is willing to fight for that trust — explaining the reasoning behind a choice instead of just delivering it, taking the time, project after project, to teach a client a little graphic design along the way.

That's the field Local Design Awards covers today — not a design culture with sixty uninterrupted years of institutional support behind it, but a small one that had to rebuild itself from a different start more than once in a single century.

The work you'll see over the coming days comes out of all of it: independent studios, one-person freelance practices, in-house teams, academic projects, and advertising agencies.

Local Design Awards doesn't give out ranks.

There's no gold, silver or bronze, no first place and second place — a project either meets the standard we're asking you to hold, or it doesn't. Evaluate each one on its own terms, not against each other. There's no set number of awards to hand out, in either direction: it could be none, it could be all of them. That's your call to make, and whatever you decide is what we'll go with.

The question in the room isn't "is this the best piece of design I've ever seen." We're not asking you to find the greatest of the greatest. We're asking whether this is good design — the kind that could help a wider public understand what good design actually looks like, in Romania, right now.

So hold a high bar, but not the highest one you own: don't comb through weak work, but don't drop a genuinely good project over a few tweaks it could have made and didn't.

Context matters as much as execution.

Ask who the project was for. A self-initiated piece had no client to answer to; a commissioned one may have had to survive a difficult client who didn't understand every choice being made. An academic project is judged differently from a professional one, and a niche artbook made for people who already care about visual culture is a different proposition from something built for a mass audience. Weigh the work accordingly.

What you're looking for: concept, originality, craft and attention to detail, use of color, and — where relevant — production quality.

The Special Jury Prize sits outside the category structure. It's awarded at the jury's discretion to the project with the greatest social impact — work that uses graphic design to address a public cause, support a community, raise awareness, or contribute to a shared good.

Any submitted project is eligible, regardless of category and regardless of whether it received an award in its category. A poster, a publication, a piece of printed matter — what matters is the work's relationship to the world beyond design.

The prize isn't guaranteed every edition. If no submitted project meets the standard you set for social impact, it won't be awarded.

But it would be nice to have it.

The judging process itself — how the day is structured, how decisions get made — will be walked through with you at the start of the judging day. It's a simple process we've developed, so there's nothing you need to prepare for that part.