DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJuly 20, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

EyesOn Design 2026: The Award Designers Give Each Other

For most of its history, the trophy case of "best design" awards has been filled by juries of critics, journalists and the public — people responding to how a thing looks. EyesOn Design is the rare exception, and that is exactly why it matters. Now in its 39th year, the award is judged by an international jury of the most senior car designers alive — Ian Callum, Wayne Cherry, Kemal Curić, Dale Harrow and their peers — the profession sitting in judgement of itself.

That changes what the award measures. EyesOn's judging is done predominately by automotive designers using professional design criteria, explicitly not on restoration or authenticity but on design character, emotional appeal and artistic excellence. It is not a popularity contest and not a spec sheet. It is the people who actually make design decisions asking a narrower, harder question of each other's work: was this the right decision, executed with conviction?

Look at what that jury rewarded in 2026, and a pattern appears. Best Concept Vehicle went to the Cadillac Elevated Velocity — praised not for surface drama but for a clear vision and resolved proportions. Bentley's EXP 15 took Best Designed Interior and the award for innovative use of colour, graphics and materials — recognition of material and spatial thinking, not ornament. And the Lifetime Design Achievement Award went to Gorden Wagener, Mercedes-Benz's chief design officer — a career recognised for building a coherent design language, not a single hit. Designers, judging designers, consistently reward the same things: clarity, conviction, and decisions that hold together.

This is the opposite of how design is usually rewarded in the wild. The market rewards what sells this quarter; social media rewards what photographs in a thumbnail; juries of non-designers reward what impresses on first glance. Those signals all bias toward the surface — the flourish, the render, the reveal. A jury of designers is far harder to fool, because they know what every gesture costs. They can see when a dramatic crease is hiding a proportional problem, when a "bold" grille is compensating for a weak stance, when an interior is styled rather than solved. Peer judgement cuts through to the concept-phase decisions underneath the styling.

It helps that the bar is set by people with nothing to prove and no product of their own to sell that day. A working chief designer assessing a rival's concept has no reason to be dazzled and every reason to be exacting — they are, in effect, marking the same exam they sit every Monday morning. That is why peer-judged honours tend to age so well: a car that wins the crowd at a launch can look dated within two years, while a car that convinces the people who design cars for a living was usually right about something structural, not merely fashionable.

There is a quiet poetry in the institution, too. EyesOn Design was founded in 1986 as a fundraiser for the Detroit Institute of Ophthalmology, and every award still funds research into vision and eye care. An award about design, judged by the people trained to see most rigorously, raising money to help others see — the whole thing is organised around the act of looking properly. That is not a bad definition of the design discipline itself: seeing what is actually there, not what you hoped for.

For anyone building anything, the lesson generalises well beyond car design. The most useful critic of a decision is almost never the audience; it is a peer who has made the same decision and knows the trade-offs. Public applause and press coverage tell you whether something is appealing on the surface. Only someone who understands the concept phase — who knows what you gave up to get here — can tell you whether the underlying decision was sound. That is why serious studios protect internal design review so fiercely, and why the EyesOn jury of working designers remains, after nearly four decades, one of the industry's most respected honours.

At Depix, this is the standard we try to hold ourselves to: not "does it look impressive," but "would a designer who knows the trade-offs call this the right decision?" The EyesOn winners are a yearly reminder that design's highest praise doesn't come from the crowd. It comes from the small number of people who could have made the decision themselves — and would have made it the same way.

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