The Winner

Bestau took top honors with a design that’s easily customizable for a wide variety of clientele. “The layout we entered was an option we create for corporate environments,” says CEO Tomasz Pajak, whose firm handles everything from enterprise to superyacht integrations. “Customers often ask for mockups before we proceed to deployment, and this was one of the concepts that we created for our clients to showcase our aesthetic sensibilities.”

The key to the design’s success is its incredibly intuitive nature. “When someone enters a room and looks at this interface, they immediately know how to control the equipment,” says Pajak. “We’ve had a lot of customers looking to upgrade their control systems, and the biggest complaint is that previous solutions look outdated, difficult, and clumsy.”

With the tool, conceptualizing the results was the most time-consuming part of the process, according to Pajak. “Working on the color schemes, working on the flow, on how it should respond — all that took more time relative to implementation.” Once they had a sketch in mind, the rest of the process — literally, a drag-and-drop session — was pretty straightforward.

“When reviewing the entries for this competition, we received many, many well-thought-out, high-quality designs and user interfaces, but we kept coming back to the design by Bestau as it landed those design principles so clearly,” says Joel Mulpeter, senior director of product marketing at Crestron. “They absolutely focused on creating a simple-to-use, elegant interface that integrates easily into the workflow of a space and demonstrates an expressiveness that resonates with the modern worker.”