At the recent Dwell on Design conference in Los Angeles, I participated in Dwell Magazine and Cool Capitals’ live graphic design contest. This competition was nuts. Each designer in the preliminary round was given a prompt to design a tote bag for the online company, coolcapitals. The trick is that each designer only had 30 minutes to complete the design., and if selected to compete in the finals, each designer would be given 30 more minutes to do touchups.

The design had to encapsulate each of the 5 capitals the company provides for their clients to explore: Amsterdam, Zulrich. Valencia, Vienna, and Antwerp. Each design was to be judged by Dwell Magazine’s Lead Designers.

The idea behind my design:

CoolCapitals has a feature on their site known as “travel bucket.” This feature allows the user to save information about certain aspects of each city that they might want to visit on their travels. I wanted to take that concept literally and make the bag your travel bucket. The bag contains illustrations of things one might encounter along their journeys.