Sharpen the pencils, polish the patio chairs, wipe the mysterious smudge off the camera lens, and tell the dog that this time, no, he cannot be the centerpiece of the entry photo. Our Design Awards are back, launching June 1, and for anyone who loves thoughtful homes, soulful gardens, smart renovations, or outdoor spaces that make neighbors slow down mid-walk, this is the season to show your work.
Design awards are more than pretty pictures in a glossy gallery. At their best, they celebrate problem solving, personality, craftsmanship, and the kind of creative decision that makes a small space feel generous or turns a neglected corner into the most beloved spot in the house. The Gardenista and Remodelista Considered Design Awards have long stood out because they welcome both professionals and passionate amateurs. That means a landscape architect with a meticulously planned courtyard can appear beside a renter who coaxed basil, tomatoes, and a tiny bistro table into a balcony the size of a yoga mat. Democracy, but with better planters.
The June 1 launch gives homeowners, renters, architects, designers, gardeners, DIYers, and hardscape heroes a clear starting line. Whether the project is a professional landscape, an edible garden, a curb appeal transformation, an outdoor living area, or a clever home improvement, the awards invite entrants to tell a design story through strong images, thoughtful captions, and a concise description of what changed, why it matters, and how the space works in real life.
What Makes These Design Awards Worth Watching?
The magic of design awards is not simply the word “winner,” though let us be honest: winner does look very handsome in a bio. The real value is visibility. A well-presented project can inspire thousands of readers, attract clients, document a creative journey, and give a designer or homeowner the rare satisfaction of saying, “Yes, the three-week argument about gravel color was worth it.”
The Considered Design Awards have historically focused on accessible, livable, and deeply personal design. Instead of rewarding only the biggest budget or the loudest marble countertop, the contest has emphasized considered choices: restraint, practicality, beauty, reuse, context, and emotional warmth. Past categories have included amateur gardens, professional landscapes, outdoor living spaces, curb appeal, edible gardens, hardscape projects, kitchens, offices, and other home-focused spaces. The result is a competition that feels less like a red carpet and more like an open garden gate.
Who Can Enter?
One of the most appealing parts of these awards is the broad eligibility. The contest has welcomed beginners, lifelong enthusiasts, landscape architects, horticulturalists, garden designers, homeowners, renters, architects, DIYers, and interior designers. In other words, if you have transformed a space with intention, care, and a little courage, you may have something worth submitting.
This openness matters. Design culture can sometimes feel locked behind expensive doors, guarded by people who say “materiality” before coffee. But good design happens everywhere: in a Brooklyn backyard where every inch works overtime, in a Santa Barbara vegetable garden that feeds a family, in a narrow shaded patio turned into a green retreat, and in a modest front yard that suddenly makes an entire street feel friendlier. A design award that recognizes both professional and amateur work reflects the truth: creativity does not check your résumé before arriving.
Key Dates and Submission Basics
The awards launch on June 1, which means the first task is simple: get organized before the deadline starts tapping its foot. Earlier award cycles have used a submission window in June and asked entrants to provide project photographs, a short written description, and captions. In the 2017 Gardenista announcement, entries could include up to ten photos, with images at least 1,000 pixels wide, plus a short paragraph describing the project and brief captions for each photo.
That format is smart because design needs both image and explanation. A photo can make people say “wow,” but the caption explains why the wow was difficult. Maybe the soil was clay. Maybe the kitchen had one outlet, three bad decisions, and a cabinet door that opened directly into someone’s kneecap. Maybe the garden had to survive deer, drought, and a toddler with a shovel. The story behind the design often gives the project its soul.
Categories That Celebrate Real-Life Design
Past Gardenista categories have included Best Garden for amateurs, Best Landscape for professionals, Best Outdoor Living Space, Best Curb Appeal, Best Edible Garden, Best Hardscape Project, and United Kingdom garden and landscape categories. Remodelista has also featured home-focused categories across interiors, kitchens, offices, and renovation projects. These categories are useful because they acknowledge that design excellence does not live in one room, one profession, or one budget level.
Garden and Landscape Design
Garden entries often shine when they show a strong relationship between plants, structure, climate, and daily use. A beautiful garden is not just a plant collection having a meeting. It needs rhythm, seasonal interest, circulation, and a reason to be used. The strongest submissions usually show how a landscape solves a problem: privacy, shade, drainage, entertaining, food growing, pollinator habitat, or the eternal question of where to put the hose so it stops looking like a sleepy snake.
Outdoor Living Spaces
Outdoor living categories celebrate patios, terraces, decks, porches, courtyards, and backyards that function like true extensions of the home. Great outdoor living design balances comfort and durability. It understands sun angles, wind, seating, lighting, storage, and the fact that cushions left in the rain develop personalities no one asked for.
Curb Appeal
Curb appeal is design’s handshake. It is the first impression a home gives to neighbors, guests, delivery drivers, and anyone walking past with an iced coffee and strong opinions. Winning curb appeal projects often combine planting, paths, paint, fencing, lighting, house numbers, and proportion into a welcoming composition. The goal is not to shout, “Look at me!” but to say, “Come closer, this place is cared for.”
Edible Gardens
Edible gardens are especially satisfying because they combine beauty with dinner. A strong edible garden entry may include raised beds, herbs, fruit trees, vertical growing, compost systems, irrigation, or smart protection from pests. The best examples avoid looking like a vegetable prison and instead feel integrated into the larger landscape.
Hardscape Projects
Hardscape design is where materials do the heavy lifting. Paths, steps, patios, retaining walls, gravel courts, stonework, decking, and built-in seating can define how a space moves and feels. A great hardscape project is measured not only by how it looks on day one, but by how it ages, drains, supports planting, and handles actual human behavior. Humans, after all, rarely walk where the architect politely suggests. We take shortcuts. Good hardscape knows this and plans accordingly.
How Winners Are Typically Chosen
In past award cycles, finalists were selected by judges and winners were chosen by public vote. This combination creates a healthy balance: expert eyes help identify strong design work, while readers bring community energy and real-world enthusiasm. It also means entrants should prepare for both audiences. Judges may notice proportion, materials, originality, and execution. Readers may respond to warmth, charm, story, and the feeling that they could happily spend a Sunday afternoon there.
Across the wider design-awards world, judging criteria often include functionality, originality, impact, beauty, user insight, design quality, sustainability, technical resolution, and cultural relevance. Fast Company’s Innovation by Design program, for example, emphasizes pillars such as functionality, logic, impact, and beauty, while other design competitions consider social, economic, ecological, and technical requirements. For home and garden projects, the same principles apply in a wonderfully practical way: Does the space work? Does it feel fresh? Does it solve a real problem? Does it improve daily life? Does it look good after the party is over and someone forgot to bring in the lanterns?
How to Prepare a Strong Design Awards Submission
A winning entry begins before you upload anything. Start by reviewing the category list carefully and choosing the best fit. Do not enter a tiny balcony herb garden as a professional landscape unless that balcony contains Versailles, in which case please explain how you handled the fountains. The right category helps judges and readers understand the scale, intent, and achievement of the project.
1. Tell a Clear Before-and-After Story
People love transformation because it gives them hope. A muddy rectangle becomes a courtyard. A blank wall becomes a vertical garden. A chaotic kitchen becomes a calm workspace where the measuring spoons are no longer hiding in witness protection. If allowed, include a before image or explain the original challenge clearly. The more specific the problem, the more satisfying the solution.
2. Use High-Quality Photos
Good photography does not require a Hollywood lighting crew, but it does require care. Shoot in soft natural light when possible. Clean the space without sterilizing it. Remove distracting clutter, straighten chairs, hide hoses, fluff cushions, and check that no trash bin is making a surprise guest appearance. Show wide views for context and detail shots for texture, craftsmanship, planting combinations, storage solutions, or materials.
3. Explain the Design Decisions
A short project description should answer the essential questions: What was the challenge? What did you change? What materials, plants, or strategies did you use? How does the space function now? What makes it personal? Avoid vague phrases such as “we wanted a beautiful oasis.” Everyone wants an oasis. Tell readers whether you used native grasses for drought resilience, gravel for drainage, built-in benches for small-space seating, or reclaimed materials because the budget had the emotional range of a teaspoon.
4. Be Honest About Constraints
Constraints often make a project more impressive. A tiny budget, difficult site, rental restrictions, shade, poor soil, neighborhood rules, or limited square footage can reveal ingenuity. Judges are not only looking for perfection. They are looking for smart responses to real conditions. A modest project with a brilliant solution can be far more memorable than an expensive project that simply bought its way out of trouble.
5. Make Captions Work Hard
Captions are not decorative sprinkles. They are miniature explanations. Use them to identify materials, plants, layout choices, and design functions. A caption like “View of patio” is fine, but “A pea-gravel dining terrace creates a permeable surface beside drought-tolerant rosemary, lavender, and olive trees” is much better. The first caption points. The second teaches.
Why June 1 Is the Perfect Launch Date
A June 1 launch is beautifully timed for design awards focused on homes and gardens. Outdoor spaces are awake, plants are filling in, light is generous, and renovation projects completed in spring can finally step forward without a winter coat. For gardeners, early June often offers that magical moment before the heat gets dramatic and the tomatoes begin making unreasonable demands. For interiors, it is a natural point in the calendar to refresh, photograph, and share spaces before summer routines take over.
The timing also gives entrants a reason to finish. Every design project has a final 5 percent that lingers like a guest who will not leave: one missing knob, one unpainted trim edge, one planter that needs the right plant, one shelf that has been “temporary” since 2021. A contest deadline creates momentum. Suddenly the loose ends look less charming and more actionable.
What Readers Can Learn From the Awards
Even if you never enter, design awards are a rich source of ideas. They show how real people use space, how professionals handle tricky sites, and how small decisions add up. You may discover a plant combination for shade, a gravel path detail, a kitchen storage idea, a way to soften a fence, or proof that a small garden can feel luxurious without requiring a moat.
The best award galleries are practical inspiration libraries. They demonstrate proportions, materials, colors, and layouts in actual homes and gardens rather than fantasy showrooms. This matters because most people are not designing for a magazine spread. They are designing around pets, kids, budgets, weather, storage, and the fact that someone in the household owns seventeen reusable water bottles.
Design Awards and the Bigger Design Conversation
The return of the awards also reflects a broader shift in design culture. Today’s strongest projects are not judged only by how polished they look. They are judged by how responsibly and intelligently they perform. Sustainability, reuse, resilience, accessibility, biodiversity, local materials, long-term maintenance, and human comfort all matter. A garden that supports pollinators, manages water wisely, and creates daily joy is not merely pretty. It is useful beauty, which is the best kind.
Similarly, interiors are increasingly evaluated by how they support real life. A kitchen that encourages cooking, a mudroom that reduces chaos, a home office that improves focus, or a small apartment that uses storage elegantly can all be award-worthy. The design world has learned, sometimes after expensive mistakes, that beauty without function is just a very photogenic inconvenience.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
The first mistake is submitting weak photos of a strong project. Blurry images, harsh shadows, cluttered frames, and confusing angles can hide excellent work. The second mistake is writing too little. A project description should not become a novel, but it should give enough detail for readers to understand the transformation. The third mistake is ignoring the category rules. If the guidelines ask for photo size, captions, or eligibility requirements, follow them exactly. Design judges may appreciate creativity, but contest administrators appreciate people who read instructions.
Another common mistake is over-styling. A bowl of lemons in the kitchen? Lovely. Seven bowls of lemons, a linen apron, three art books, and a casually placed baguette in a bathroom? Suspicious. Let the project breathe. Real spaces have life; they do not need to look like they were attacked by a prop closet.
Experience Notes: What Preparing an Award Entry Teaches You
Preparing a design awards submission is its own mini design education. The process forces you to look at your project with fresh eyes. You begin by walking through the space and asking what actually works. Does the path feel natural? Does the seating invite conversation? Does the planting have rhythm? Does the room support daily routines? This kind of review can be surprisingly revealing. The chair you thought was charming may block circulation. The planter you forgot about may be the secret hero. The little shelf near the door may deserve a standing ovation for preventing key-related household drama.
One useful experience is learning how much story lives in constraints. A designer might remember that the garden had poor drainage and limited access, so every stone had to be carried by hand. A homeowner might recall that the edible garden started with two tomato seedlings and a stubborn belief that basil could improve morale. A renter might explain how removable planters, outdoor rugs, and lightweight furniture created a welcoming terrace without violating a lease. These details make an entry human. They remind readers that design is not magic. It is decision-making under pressure, with occasional splinters.
Another lesson comes from photography. The camera is honest in ways that feel mildly rude. It shows crooked cushions, awkward gaps, overstuffed shelves, and empty corners that seemed fine in person. But this is useful. Styling for a submission helps clarify what the design is trying to say. When you remove visual noise, the important choices stand out: the curve of a path, the texture of brick, the contrast between soft grasses and crisp steel edging, the way morning light touches a breakfast nook. Photographing a project teaches composition, patience, and humility. Especially humility.
Writing the project description is equally valuable. It requires you to move beyond “we made it nicer” and explain the thinking. Maybe the goal was to create privacy without building a fortress. Maybe the material palette was chosen to connect an old house to a modern addition. Maybe native plants reduced maintenance while giving birds and bees a better buffet. When you can explain a design clearly, you understand it more deeply. That clarity also helps future clients, readers, and even your future self.
Finally, submitting to design awards builds confidence. Not every entry becomes a finalist, and that is perfectly fine. The act of preparing the submission creates a record of your work and a moment of reflection. It says, “This project mattered enough to document.” For professionals, that record can support a portfolio. For homeowners and DIYers, it can mark the completion of a meaningful personal achievement. And for everyone, it offers the quiet thrill of joining a larger design conversation. Your garden, kitchen, patio, or hardscape project may inspire someone else to begin. That is the real prize, though a feature post and bragging rights are certainly not terrible accessories.
Final Thoughts
Our Design Awards are back, launching June 1, and the invitation is simple: show the work, share the story, and celebrate the spaces that make everyday life better. Whether you are a professional designer with a portfolio full of polished projects or an amateur gardener who turned a forgotten corner into a sanctuary, this is your chance to present design that is thoughtful, useful, personal, and beautiful.
The best entries will not merely display taste. They will reveal intention. They will show how a problem became a plan, how materials were chosen with care, how plants or rooms support real life, and how creativity can turn even limited space into something memorable. So gather your photos, write the captions, check the rules, and prepare for June 1. The awards are back, and somewhere out there, a very photogenic garden bench is waiting for its close-up.
