New awards calendar makes deadlines a breeze

A new must-have global tracking calendar for creative awards has been launched from London. The free software T-Minus Zero assists creative teams plan and target their entries to up to 130 awards throughout Europe, North America, Australasia and Africa.
 
Data can be filtered by region, date and eligibility. Users can download their own personal calendar as a dynamic infographic screensaver and add new awards information via the site's contact link.

Designed by Steve Moss and Jo Finch at RKCR/Y&R in collaboration with digital hotshop B-Reel, T-Minus aims to ensure that agencies and creatives need never miss an awards deadline and allows them to plan their projects out of the door without the usual last minute panic.

Damon Collins, creative director at RKCR/Y&R said that for creatives the self-inflicted pressure to win awards is constant.
"The stress of making sure your work has appeared by the various dates of each of the numerous awards competitions only adds to that pressure. No matter how brilliant your work is, if it's not eligible for or entered into the competitions no one's walking for anything," he said.
 
"Jo and Steve always had a sheet of layout paper on their desk listing awards deadlines and they'd cross off the weeks as they went by. We thought it would be great to create a digital version of those scraps of paper: a utility that could benefit anyone who had ever suffered that last minute panic of 'Christ, it needs to have run by next week and it's not even shot yet'."

B-Reel's art director Mark Wheeler said he had considered several approaches to the awards calendar dilemma before deciding on an approach that could remind without intruding and yet also provide enough detail to be genuinely useful.
"The solution is a tight combination of ambient information – a screensaver that passively reminds you of deadlines – as well as detailed reference information in the form of a fast, flexible, one-page website that's accessible from anywhere," he said.
 
"As well as creating a practical tool for creatives we also wanted to make something that would look great aesthetically running as your screensaver every day. The result is a constantly updating colourscape, with individual award deadlines growing and becoming more agitated as units of time flow around them, using physics-based animation throughout. Working like this makes for some cool but unexpected results – you have to be ready to experiment and see what happens."
 
Plans for the resource include an archive of past winners, an awards newsfeed and social networking functionality. Various options to monetise T-Minus in are also currently in development.

Download T-Minus for free here.