The 2015 Brilliance Awards

2015 Event Winners

See the winning categories here

2015 Event Photos

2015 Submission Photos

Project Categories

For 2015 the Brilliance Awards will have five categories.

Each category has it's own scoring criteria as is linked above that will be given to the judges. The PDFs can be opened or downloaded for your convenience.

Category Descriptions

  • Large Scale Commercial is generally qualified as buildings which have an industrial, commercial, or hospitality intent and the project square footage exceeds approximately 30,000 square feet. Size is not a hard line, simply a guideline.

  • Small Scale Commercial is similar, but simply smaller in project size.

  • Residential Category is for projects which are solely for residential usage. There can also be part of the project for entertainment as many higher end residences are, however the majority purpose of the project must be living space.

  • The Exterior Category has been simplified from previous years to include both exterior facade and landscape only projects. A submitted design can be for one of these two types of lighting or both. The criteria has been designed to score each equivalently.

  • The Custom Luminaire category is new for 2015. It's intent is to judge and award the creativity of a custom luminaire design for project needs.

  • The Energy Efficiency sub-category is applicable to all projects. It is an "additional entry" that any project can also enter at no additional cost. There is no judging criteria for the category, and it will allow the designer to describe how it excels in this area, and what guidelines it adheres to. You should only be entering in this category if it very good in terms of energy efficient design.

For More information on the submittal process, guidelines, and rules - Please see our submission guidelines page.

The Brilliance Awards is accepting entries for all of these categories. However based on submissions; we reserve freedom to not distribute awards in any category if deemed appropriate.

Submission Guidelines

General

  • There are five categories and one sub category (energy efficiency) for awards for 2015. For information please see the Categories Page.

  • To Submit a project for the Brilliance Awards please go to the Project Submission Page.

  • Submissions are open until July 31st, 2015.

  • Projects must have been completed within the last 3 calendar years (any project completed since January 2012 is eligible).

  • Projects which have been previously submitted to the Brilliance Awards can be resubmitted if they fit within the time frame and did not win an award the year they were submitted.

  • Award submittals will be handled through an online form submittal.

  • Each project is submitted as a series of pictures and narratives.

    • Up to 10 pictures can be submitted per project, each with text.

    • It is not necessary to upload the maximum of 10 photographs.

    • There is a 500 word limit to each photograph accompanying texts. This allows long descriptions if only a few photos are uploaded such that all criteria can be addressed. However it is not necessary to be wordy in descriptions if other photographs and text address the point.

    • The text descriptions should cumulatively address all scoring criteria. No one text box needs to address any certain amount of criteria, it is simply recommended that all criteria be addressed at some point in the project submission.

  • The cost for project submissions is $50 dollars and is due at project submission.

  • The Brilliance Awards non-profit is not required to grant awards for categories, the board does so based on judging scores, feedback, and maintains the right to grant awards based on lighting design excellence.

    • Categories in general can receive a design of honor, or design of merit. While the brilliance awards committee generally will not give more than one of honor and one to two of merit, these numbers are not set in stone, and final awards are given out based on projects submitted and judged scores. 

  • The Brilliance Awards Board has the final say in all matters regarding award granting and judging.

If any clarification is needed please feel free to email info@brillianceawards.com

Photograph Uploads

For photographs it is good practice to utilize JPEG compression format and keep file sizes relatively small. A photograph of 1 MB will be plenty sufficient for judges to evaluate the shot. Please try to adhere to this. Uploading 10MB photographs is unnecessary and may crash your web browser when trying to submit, making the process difficult. For more information on photographs please read through the sample project below.

Sample Project

We are including a sample project that has a description, project background, and scoring sheet all included. It goes through the different narratives and how each point in the scoring sheet was addressed, along with the pictures that were submitted. We highly recommend reading through this.

At the end of this document is a note on photography. In short - we do allow HDR photography to better mimic the human eye, however with modern DSLR cameras sometimes that is not required. We do discourage the use of fill-light or heavily altered photos. We want the judges to see the beauty of the project, not an artificial re-creation of what the project could have looked like, and we appreciate respect in regards to this.

View Sample Project