Elektron has announced that the Red Dot jury has reached a decision and is awarding the coveted Red Dot: Best of the Best in the Red Dot Award: Communication Design 2016 to Elektron and the Techno Creatives for their outstanding Overbridge project.
In sessions that lasted several days, the 26 experts on the Red Dot jury evaluated each of the large number of entries individually, live and on site. This year saw designers and companies from a total of 46 countries take part in the award. Every year, a select few projects particularly stand out from the numerous entries because of their exceptional design and innovative approach. This time, only 0,8 percent of the projects are recognised with the Red Dot: Best of the Best, the award for outstanding design quality.
To fully integrate analog synthesizers and drum machines with computers has long been a dream for many electronic musicians. Introducing Overbridge , a breakthrough technology allowing real analog instruments to be handled as software instruments, Elektron made this reality.
Overbridge unites hardware and software. It enables real analog instruments inside your DAW, and you can combine the strengths of Elektron hardware and your music studio software. The immersive and thoroughly designed Overbridge environment encourages only what matters the most. Creativity. Usability. Convenience. Immediacy. A brilliant and more personal sound.
Instead of conceiving a digital simulacrum of a physical control board, resulting in minor or no advantages, Elektron and The Techno Creatives utilized combined digital know-how and created a totally new visual experience, free from traditional rotary wheels and sliders. The intuitive Overbridge interaction patterns are designed with musicians in mind, enabling them to accomplish envisioned results in a straightforward manner. Frequencies are for example visually represented as real-time updated graphs, which a user can edit. Information is not obscured in dropdowns or buried in menus. The day and night modes, utilizing carefully designed color schemes, makes Overbridge perfectly fit for the working life of a musician. The highly functional and beautiful user interface of Overbridge really stands out. Finally, musicians can combine the power of analog hardware instruments with the benefits of software control.
“The increasingly international nature of our competition is proof of its growing reputation in the global design world”, says Prof. Dr. Peter Zec, founder and CEO of Red Dot. “We are very happy with this year’s competition and are delighted at the very high standard of the award-winning projects from around the world. In today’s world, communication designers have become the catalysts between the worlds of language, economics and technology, in other words, they are the engines of progress. More than ever before, we want to be a driving force for development and trends in the sector and give established as well as up-and-coming designers the opportunity to find and claim their place in the market. The Red Dot seal of quality, known around the world to stand for a high level of design, helps them to achieve this.”
The laureates will be honoured on 4 November 2016 in Berlin where the Red Dot Gala will take place in the Konzerthaus Berlin for the sixth time in succession.
Afterwards, the Red Dot prize winners will be celebrated at the Designers’ Night in the E-Werk Berlin. Here, for one night only, the exclusive winners’ exhibition “Design on Stage” will be presented at which Red Dot will also be showing the award-winning Overbridge.
