The best creative work deserves its own space. The Work: an online space for all Cannes Lions winning creativity. Each piece framed by the story of how it was briefed, created and delivered, and the results it achieved.
Since 1954 Cannes Lions — the world-famous festival of creativity — has compiled a steadily mounting archive of every piece of design entered into its prestigious awards scheme, making it one of the largest repositories of award-winning, best-in-class creative in the world.
Not content with capturing ten years of award-winning creative, The Work’s real magic lies in capturing the context surrounding the creative; a multitude of data and analytics allowing users to quickly put together a complete picture of any given sector, at any time.
We were approached to rapidly create a creative platform and accompanying identity system to launch the new product during the Cannes Lions 2018 Festival of Creativity.
The new platform needed to appeal not only to creative studios, but in-house design teams, as well as executives, planners and marketing managers.
A key part to the branding and delivery was to enable fast and easy access to all the award-winning global campaigns — searchable by company or person, so whilst it was important to give the creative space a branded look, it was also vital that the experience was efficient and effective.
The name ‘The Work’ was chosen for its no nonsense, straight-forward appeal. Well-worn within the design lexicon, ‘The Work’ has long been used as a shorthand for ‘advertising creative’.
Seen at face value, The Work is a beautiful gallery within which to view anything from Apple’s ‘Welcome Home’ by Spike Jonze to VW’s infamous ‘Lemon’ ads, but when you dive a little deeper you can compile an image of everything the competition were producing when VW dropped the Lemon. All driven by a plethora of information surrounding each individual creative submission.
For us, this was The Work’s defining characteristic, informing our approach to the identity: A beautiful complexity, born of data.
The Work has real potential to become a powerful tool for people on both sides of the creative industry.
This ability to see the context surrounding each piece of work led us to explore the space unseen; what happens when you look below the surface of creative and discover something far more incredible.
The brandmark is a direct translation of this sentiment, We created an adaptive frame — representing the context and data surrounding the creative — able to support content of any format, size, shape or medium.
The Kaleidoscopic patterns seen within the wider brandworld were inspired by the feeling of ‘Always something new to be discovered’, a deeper more complex understanding, hidden just beneath the surface.
We gave SomeOne a tough brief. To bring the amazing creativity at the heart of Cannes Lions to life through a new digital proposition. But also to create an identity that could live all year around, engage an audience digitally and accommodate constantly evolving features and content. In a tight timescale they nailed it. And the customer reaction to the product and brand has been fantastic.
The colours were chosen to work alongside the existing UI and UX work created by digital powerhouse Made by Many, while avoiding any direct clashes with the Cannes Lions main brand and its sub-brand initiatives.
A bold, dynamic identity – The Work complements Cannes Lions’ main brand story whilst creating its own unique voice and visual language.
It succeeds in highlighting the pivotal work in the industry by constructing a key space where creatives can share, collaborate and discover.