2012 has been an incredible year for design! We just wrapped up our season by shipping out 29 trophies around the world to our awards winners. The Core77 Design Awards celebrates the collaborative nature of the design process with our trophy—a mold designed by New York-based design studio Rich Brilliant Willing. Their approach was to design an artifact that could be employed in the creation of multiples, honoring the kind of group effort that designers and their clients engage in every day. As RBW explained, "We were inspired by a 'mold' as an image and symbol of manufacturing and design."
As part of this manufacturing story, we worked with our partners at Proto Labs to tell the story of creating this year's trophy. Working with the engineers at Proto Labs, each trophy is CNC-milled from a solid block of alumnium—we had boxes of trophies in our office within a week of submiting the final CAD files!
Here's the Proto Labs mill that made our trophies!