Moleskine Travel Notebook Competition Judging

Moleskine Asia held a competition (Invitation Au Voyage!) to create a travel notebook using any one of their notebooks. The deadline for submissions was 30 June 2007. AC invited me to be on the panel of judges to select the grand-prize winner of a round-trip ticket to Paris as well as other prize-winners. The competition sounded like it would yield a lot of creative work (when we first started WANLILU Play, we awarded travel grants to students based on their own travel proposals), and going through them sounded like fun.

The three judges, which were AC, MJ (a teacher at St Martin's in London) and myself, met up at agnès b (PN couldn't join us, but he judged the entries separately). cafe yesterday afternoon to go through nearly 100 entries. It took us nearly 3 hours to select the winning entry. At first, the task of going through all the entries seemed daunting, but we very quickly figured out that the three of us had very similar views and managed to come up with a very good system for identifying the good from the mundane. We all leaned towards notebooks that were aesthetically daring and visually interesting. In terms of content, we were not impressed with what AC called "stick, stick" jobs, where photos or receipts or ticket stubs would be randomly stuck on pages. Nor did we find straightforward travel diaries particularly inspiring. Not that these entries did not have their merits. We could tell that all the entrants put in a lot of time and effort into their travel notebooks and it seemed a bit harsh that we would have to whittle so many of them out. But our task was to pick just one winner, two runner-ups and 40-50 for the exhibition, so we had to be efficient. In the end, we came to a unanimous decision to award the grand prize to PW, who submitted a beautifully-executed travel notebook with wonderfully-rendered, intricate drawings and collages with witty writing about his trip to Taipei.

There will be several exhibitions of the submissions next month at Festival Walk, Times Square and other locations. See photographs of the winning entries here.

One of the runner-up entries.