SWE Magazine Receives Awards for Publishing Excellence

International competition recognizes the work of corporate and nonprofit publishers, editors, writers, and designers who create print, web, electronic, and social media.

SWE Magazine continued its long history of success in this year’s APEX Awards competition, earning seven Awards of Excellence and two Grand Awards. The Grand Awards are the highest honor conferred in this international competition, now in its 33rd year.Receiving a Grand Award was Anne Perusek, SWE director of editorial and publications, for the entire Fall 2020 issue. Of the issue, the judges offered this narrative:

“The multi-colored, maze-like illustration on a front cover with the probing question ‘How do we create systemic change?’ immediately grabbed this judge’s attention. Within the first 18 pages, the reader is offered thoughtful, insightful editorial and statistics on such critical topics as diversity in engineering by gender, race, sexual orientation and age … addressing the impacts of the pandemic and racism … and the factors surrounding ‘#ShutDownSTEM.’ The undeniably and vitally important topic of the changes in work and the workplace due to the pandemic, which appears right before the feature article on systemic change, assured this judge’s opinion that this is an issue packed solid with valuable information for its readers. Job well done!”

Art Director JoAnn Dickey received the Grand Award in design and illustration for the feature “Dismantling the Glass Ceiling,” which appeared in the 2020 edition of State of Women in Engineering, SWE’s annual research issue. The judges shared these thoughts:

“There’s an adage which simply states ‘sometimes, less is more.’ As it relates to design and illustration, this is true when the artist/designer/illustrator provides just enough so that it supports, but does not dominate the editorial content. This entry is a perfect example. An article with the headline ‘Dismantling the Glass Ceiling’ has each of those words divided by a simple horizontal break along with puzzle pieces made out of glass. It is the perfect accompaniment to the topic of the article.”

This year’s competition included a special category, COVID-19 Media, in which SWE Contributor Seabright McCabe earned an Award of Excellence for “COVID-19: STEM Strikes Back,” a news story from the Spring 2020 issue. Dickey’s design of an origami insert, which was included in the Conference 2020 issue, also received an Award of Excellence.

APEX Grand Award 2021
Magazines, Journals, and Tabloids/full issue

SWE Magazine Fall 2020

Anne Perusek, director of editorial and publications

Award of Excellence, cover design, JoAnn Dickey, art director

APEX Grand Award 2021

Design and Illustration, Feature Article

SWE Magazine State of Women in Engineering 2020

JoAnn Dickey, art director