Yijia Xie Is Honored with the Silver A' Design Award for Middle of Nowhere 404 Website Design in Website and Web Design

Yijia Xie honored for website and web design by the international grand jury of the 2021 - 2022 A' Design Award & Competition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COMO, Italy, April 22, 2022 /DesignNewswire/ A' Design Award & Competition has announced that Middle of Nowhere 404 Website Design by Yijia Xie, designed for IBM Research, has been granted the Silver A' Design Award in the Website and Web Design category. The result belongs to the 2021 - 2022 A' Design Award & Competition and was decided through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who scored anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.

About the Silver A' Design Award

The Silver A' Design Award celebrates top-tier designs that embody excellence and innovation. This award acknowledges creations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional, reflecting the designer's deep understanding and skill. Silver A' Design Award recipients are recognized for their contribution to raising industry standards and advancing the practice of design. Their work often incorporates original innovations and elicits a strong emotional response, making a notable impact on the improvement of everyday life.

Regarding Middle of Nowhere 404 Website Design

Middle of Nowhere is a 404 error page created for a research organization website. A 404 page appears when a requested webpage does not exist, and this design turns that moment into a visit to imagined places. The landscapes shown are made by a generative adversarial network, a machine learning model trained on thousands of photographs of real landscapes from around the world. The results are places that exist nowhere. The page is built as a responsive website, and the intent is to make being lost online calm and engaging.

About Yijia Xie

Yijia Xie is an NYC-based visual designer, creative coder, and futurist interested in branding, creative coding, and typography. She works with creative agencies and tech companies/startups to help them bring unique ideas to life with design and technology. She currently works at IBM Research and previously at &Walsh.

Award Record

This recognition makes Yijia Xie a winner of 1 A' Design Award.

About the A' Website and Web Design Awards

The A' Web Design Award is an international web design competition recognizing good web designs by leading web designers, coders and developers worldwide. It is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to web designers, user interface designers, user experience designers and graphic designers from all countries. Typical entries include web design, portfolios, e-commerce sites, blogs, news websites and social media platforms. The awarded web designs are published at https://designers.org/design-category/web

About A' Design Award & Competition

Organized annually since 2008, A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The philanthropic mission of the A' Design Award is to advance society through good design, by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Nominations are peer reviewed and evaluated anonymously by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. Eligible laureates receive the A' Design Prize, which includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, uploading a work and receiving a preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. More information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com

Press Resources

Winner Page: https://designers.org/137451
A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/137451
Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!137451
Laureate Profile: https://designers.org/d/328241

Media Contact

Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953

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Fact Sheet

The Work

Project: Middle of Nowhere 404 Website Design
Function: 404 Website Design
Category: Website and Web Design
Discipline: Communication Design
Industry: Software and Branding & Advertising
Colors: Dark Slate Gray, Dim Gray, Slate Gray and Lavender
Images: 5
Client: IBM Research

The Recognition

Laureate: Yijia Xie
Country: United States of America
Recognition: Silver A' Design Award
Edition: 2021 - 2022
Design ID: #137451

Credits

Image Credits: IBM Research/Yijia Xie

Design Details

Unique Properties: This 404-page design comes from the idea of "The middle of nowhere." "404" means that the webpage doesn't exist, so this project creates an environment that makes users feel lost around the internet data and enjoy the virtual landscapes. By training a machine learning model that combines thousands of images, Yijia creates unique and beautiful places that don't exist in the whole world or even in the universe. They are just the landscapes generated by Artificial Intelligence.
Inspiration: As a top leader in the AI industry, IBM Research is relentlessly curious about all the ways that computing can change the world. Today's AI is narrow. Applying trained models to new challenges requires an immense amount of new data training and time. People need AI that combines different forms of knowledge, unpacks causal relationships, and learns new things on its own. This 404 page explores a new possibility combining machine learning and design practice to increase the brand awareness of IBM research.
Research: Our goal is to create an unprecedented 404 page connecting to IBM Research's brand identity and focus areas. I came up with different sketch directions, including typography&illustration style, and an interactive website. We finally decided on the concept of "Middle of nowhere" by using artificial intelligence technology. We hope to relay "Welcome to the future" to people through this 404 page.
Challenge: It's difficult to collect all the appropriate databases and train the machine learning model. I tested many times and learned the new technology&knowledge during the model training to get unique and beautiful results.
Realization and Technology: Generative adversarial network/Machine learning/UI Design
Operation and Interaction: These images/videos of nonexistent landscapes were created using a generative adversarial network. It’s a type of machine learning model that can create novel content after being shown many original pieces of content. In this case, we showed our GAN thousands of images of landscapes from around the globe, and it generated these rather other-worldly images by combining aspects of everything it’s been shown.
Project Duration and Location: 2021.11-2022.02 New York
Specifications: Responsive website construction
Keywords: Machine Learning, Artificial intelligence, Website design, GAN