three to watch.

The Design Museum this week announced its longlist for ‘Designs of the Year’. Maybe their description of these awards as the ‘Oscars of the design world’ is pushing it, but the five-year old-scheme comes with enough glitter and gravitas to mean people sit up and take notice.

There are a couple of things that set ‘Designs of the Year’apart.Firstly, you can’t enter work… you have to be chosen by a panel of experts. The names of these wise heads haven’t been revealed yet, but they are usually desperately starry types from different corners of the design universe (and last year, Will Self). The nominations are, as usual, mind-blowingly diverse — from Hopkins Architects’ 2012 Olympic Velodrome, to the BBC website’s latest home page, to the Duchess of Cambridge’s McQueen wedding dress.Next, it’s really international — buildings in Haiti, Japanese fashion, German furniture, US magazines. Last year’s winner was Samuel Wilkinson’s sculptural Plumen Lightbulb 001, dubbed ‘the world’s first designer eco-bulb’. In 2009, Sheperd Fairey’s ‘Hope’ Barack Obama poster got the vote.Finally, ‘Designs of the Year’ has its own six-month long exhibition at the Design Museum, running from 8 February to 15 July. Now that’s what you call exposure.So it was with some delight that I found out that three designs close to my heart have made it on to the longlist. Here’s my totally biased opinion, and part in their success (just kidding).

1 Mark Porter’s iPad app for the Guardian.

Impeccably considered, and downloaded nearly 150,000 times in its first week of release, this sets a new standard in ‘newspaper’ apps. Mark is an old mate of mine — I worked with him many years ago on a design and advertising magazine called Direction, where he was art director. He then went on to greater things, most notably becoming CD of the Guardian and overseeing its redesign to Berliner format in 2005. More recently, I helped craft some words for Mark Porter Associates’ website, which are going live soon.