Nicky Dyer
UX UI and visual designer
Creating an experience uplift to engage, excite and give credence to the calibre of award entrants.
Student craft design awards
Background — The ECC NZ Student Craft Design Awards has been running since 1975. In the early days it was an award to recognise weaving, moving through to a becoming a bursary award in 1986.
The awards are run on a shoe-string with a volunteer network so funding for any design and advertising is nil! Since 2015 the awards have had a wonderful network of high calibre sponsors, who put forward award funding for each award and many of whom, with experts in each of the category fields sit on the judging panel.
Photo wall
Using the logo pillars to make a photo-wall for the awards night at The Dowse Art Museum.
Awards website
The project — The awards are really well supported by students as the tertiary institutions do a fabulous job of socialising them through their various courses and networks and despite not really having a brand to speak of great attention is brought to the awards. In 2019 we wanted to bring a little more life to the awards and grow up the presentation and socialising of the ‘open for entry’ period.
Approach — Given the awards are mostly advertised on social, and the committee don’t have a lot of content or time to gather content we developed an adaptive logo that can animate and change to grab attention.
This approach enabled us to generate multiple assets and a variety of sponsor tiles, posts and ads relatively quickly to give a suite of content assets for social posts to keep things a bit fresh during the entry period.
We began the process with the Friends of the Dowse logo. This logo is built from 3 pillars that represent the Dowse Art Museum (and is a version of their logo). We then unleashed the pillars and let them form a whole range of unique formations, settling on one for each category award - the possibilities from here are endless.
Outcomes — With this suite of assets we’re now able to post more regularly without using the same images and being too repetitive on our social channels. We’ve also created a suite of assets that our sponsors can freely use on their websites to publicise the awards.
This brand is in the early stages, and we’re excited to see where it can go. It’s likely we will move to a co-design model with other collaborators to keep it fresh and interesting.
Posters
