Its portfolio on the war in Iraq earned it the Peter Sullivan Award

The jury, chaired by Nigel Holmes, also awarded 20 gold, 57 silver and 67 bronze medals

El Mundo is the leader in on-line categories: 13 of its 14 medals were for work for its digital edition


For the second consecutive year, The New York Times has obtained the first prize in the 12th International Infographic Awards. Its portfolio on the war in Iraq, to which the entire department under Charles Blow contributed, won the Peter Sullivan Prize that the jury awards each year to the best work presented.

The winners were announced today, Friday March 26, during the closing ceremony of the twelfth World Infographics Summit. The jury, chaired by Nigel Holmes, from Great Britain, awarded a total of 144 medals: 20 gold, 57 silver and 67 bronze, plus four special mentions.

In addition to the Peter Sullivan Prize, The New York Times also obtained 3 gold, 8 silver and 2 bronze medals, and was only bettered by El Mundo (Spain), which received 14 medals in all, four of them gold. In this case, all the medals but one corresponded to work presented in on-line graphics categories, with only one bronze medal for printed graphics. We can thus say that the New York paper was the winner in the printed category and the Spanish concern came out leader in the on-line categories.

The New York Times obtained a gold medal for its portfolios on the Iraqi conflict mentioned earlier and the Columbia catastrophe, both in its printed and on-line versions. The gold medals for elmundo.es were awarded for its special editions on the hundredth anniversary of aviation and the war in Iraq, together with a sports portfolio.

High in the media ranking was also ABC (Spain), with 3 gold, 1 silver and 3 bronze medals; Expansión (Spain), with 1 gold, 5 silver and 2 bronze medals; Clarín (Argentina), with 1 gold, 4 silver and 3 bronze medals); and La Voz de Galicia (Spain), with 1 gold, 3 silver and 2 bronze medals.

• By country, the ranking is headed by Spain, with a total of 58 medals (11 gold, 25 silver and 22 bronze), followed by the United States with 40 medals (5 gold, 20 silver and 15 bronze), Brazil, with ten (1 gold, 3 silver and 6 bronze), and Argentina, Germany and the United Kingdom, with eight medals each. In all, media from thirteen different countries were considered to be worthy of these Malofiej 12 awards.

• Because of their importance, we should make special mention of the prizes given by the jury in category 1, in acknowledgment of overall graphics quality in the media, not just a specific project. Expansión received a gold medal acknowledging that it is the paper with the best overall infographics in the world in the category of less than 50,000 copies printed. The Brazilian magazine Mundo Estranho, published by the Abril publishing group, obtained the silver medal in the same category, magazine section; and Clarín (Argentina) and El Caribe (Dominican Republic) received bronze medals in for media with over 175,000 and less than 50,000 copies, respectively.

• On this occasions, the jury awarded special mentions to elmundo.es (Spain), sunsentinel.com (United States), bbc.com (United Kingdom) and a Spanish publishing house, Sol 90.


The international jury was chaired by Nigel Holmes, from Great Britan, who used to be in charge of graphics for Time Magazine (U.S.), is now a partner manager of the Visual Explanations company and has written books which have become classics in the field: 'Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts & Diagrams’ or 'Designing Pictorial Symbols', among others. The other members of the jury were Paul Mijksenaar, from Holland, chairman of the Bureau Mijksenaar studio and a professor at the University of Delft (Holland); Linda Eckstein, graphics editor for Fortune magazine (U.S.); Thomas Heumann, infographics director of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily paper and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung Sunday supplement; Alejandro Tumas, head of infographics for Clarín (Buenos Aires, Argentina); Kris Viesselman, the creative director for the San Jose Mercury News (U.S.); Ana Serra, infographic editor for the Expresso weekly magazine (Portugal); Alberto Cairo, head of infographics for elmundo.es (España); Gert Nielsen, infographic editor for the Ekstra Bladet newspaper (Denmark); Fernando Rubio, head of illustration and infographics for ABC (Spain); Geoff McGhee, infographic editor of nytimes.com, the digital edition of The New York Times (U.S.); José Luis Valero, professor at the Department of Audio-visual Communication, Faculty of Communication, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona and the author of books such as 'La infografía. Técnicas, análisis y usos periodísticos'; Rafael Cores, professor at the Department of Journalistic Projects of the University of Navarre’s Faculty of Communication; and Miguel Urabayen, honorary professor of Visual Journalism at the University of Navarre, and the leading film critic in the Spanish press.

77 media from 18 different countries entered the twelfth edition of the Malofiej awards, the most important prizes in the world for the field. Organised by the Spanish Chapter of the Society for News Design and the University of Navarre’s Faculty of Communication, there were a total of 1,250 entries for these Malofiej awards (named as a tribute to Argentinean cartographer, the late Alejandro Malofiej), 1,178 of which corresponded to printed press categories and 72 to on-line media. In the 11th edition, in 2003, entries totalled 1,187.

By country, Spain presented the most entries (378 presented by 19 different media), followed by the United States (264 entries by 23 media), Brazil (105 entries by 6 media) and Argentina (89 entries by 3 media). Entries were also received from Germany, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Portugal, Italy and Holland, in Europe; Costa Rica, Venezuela, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Ecuador and Chile, from Latin America; and Japan, the only Asian representative.