Legal
Terms & Conditions
The rules that govern entering, judging, voting and publication.
Eligibility
Entry is open to individuals and organisations working in design, wherever they are based, provided the work entered was made for a client, an institution or a course in the region the programme serves, or by an entrant based in it.
Three tiers run in parallel: Students, Freelancers, and Companies & Agencies. An entrant competes in one tier per entry, and the tier is verified against evidence before judging - enrolment for students, a trade licence or registration for the other two.
Work made while enrolled may be entered in the Students tier even if the entrant has since graduated. What governs the tier is when the work was made, not when the form was submitted.
Members of the current jury, the programme team and their immediate colleagues may not enter in the cycle they serve. A declared conflict of interest removes a juror from a group, not an entrant from the award.
Entry rules
Each entry names one base sub-category, which sets the criteria it is judged on and the price it is charged. Additional groups may be added as paid add-ons, and every add-on must share the base group's parent category.
The entrant warrants that they hold the rights to everything submitted, that any client whose work appears has agreed to its publication, and that credited contributors have been named accurately.
Work already entered in a previous Gridliners cycle may be entered again, but the earlier record stays published and a jury will see it. Work that has won in a previous cycle may not be re-entered in the same form.
An entry may be edited until its submission window closes. After that it is locked, because a jury reading a moving target is not judging the same thing as the jury beside it.
Judging and public voting
Every group is scored against four criteria: the brief, the idea, the execution and the outcome. Scores are recorded per criterion, not as a single impression, and jurors may not introduce a criterion of their own.
Where two entries in a group finish level, the tiebreak reads execution, then the brief, then the outcome, in that order. Public votes are never part of the calculation.
Public voting is a separate, published count. It runs on the shortlist, one vote per project per email address, confirmed by a code. It does not affect a medal, and it is not a jury score.
A group may award gold, silver and bronze, or fewer. A withheld place is simply not awarded and no explanation is published, because publishing why nobody won is a judgement on the entries that did compete.
Fees and refunds
Prices are published before entries open and are locked to an entry at checkout, so a window closing mid-submission never changes what an entrant already agreed to pay.
An entry fee is refundable in full until the submission window closes. After it closes the entry has entered verification and the fee is not refundable, because the work of assessing it has begun.
Where the programme moves an entry to a different tier after verification and the price of that tier is lower, the difference is refunded. Where it is higher, no additional charge is made.
Payments are processed by Stripe. The programme does not hold card numbers at any point.
Disqualification
An entry is disqualified where the work is not the entrant's, where rights or client consent were misrepresented, where a tier declaration is contradicted by the evidence and not corrected, or where votes were obtained by automated or purchased means.
Disqualification is decided by the programme, recorded with its reason in an internal audit log, and communicated to the entrant. The reason is not published: a public explanation of a disqualification is a public accusation.
A disqualified entry forfeits its fee and any place it held. Where a disqualification happens after results are published, the record is corrected and the correction is dated.
Publishing rights
The entrant keeps every right in their work. By entering, they grant the programme a non-exclusive, worldwide licence to reproduce the submitted material for the purpose of judging, publication of results, the archive, the ceremony and the programme's own editorial coverage.
That licence does not extend to advertising a third party, to resale, or to any use by a partner. No partner receives entry material.
Shortlisted and awarded entries stay published after their cycle closes. That permanence is the point of the archive; an entrant who needs a page withdrawn should write to the programme, and a withdrawal removes the page rather than rewriting the record of the result.