PromaxBDA Awards 2023
Promax is the global association for the entertainment marketing industry, representing thousands of people who create, market, and distribute content in media. Their conference brings together the top marketing and design teams from across the industry to explore new strategies, network, and showcase the greatest creative in entertainment marketing. For many years, it has been one of our team’s favorite events to attend. We love the opportunity Promax provides to connect with the community, meet up with clients, and be part of the design environment of peers.
We were asked to create the 2023 conference branding design for their five events. This involved crafting a complete design package for their awards shows, including a 90 second opening.
It could be anything, but had to include the iconic Promax Muse.
Creating this piece celebrating our peers around the world - a group that we know has high expectations - was equally exciting and daunting. The audience would be incredibly discerning. We’d be lying if we said that didn’t get our nerves going
Our goal was to create something we were proud of, something beautiful and inspiring to watch, and something that spoke to being a creative in 2023.
Our direction was sparked by a quote from Elbert Hubbard…
“Art is not a thing, it is a way.” – Elbert Hubbard
The work of art
With AI-art dominating recent headlines, we’ve been asking a lot of questions about the nature of art. Is art defined by the creator or the end result? Even with AI-generated images and text, art doesn’t just exist. It “becomes” from a process of learning, prompting, interaction and feedback. Art happens in the crafting phase. It’s an exhilarating course that takes us on a journey of introspection, all fueled by a sense of curiosity and a drive for betterment.
To us, the celebration of the input and collaborative back-and-forth was the heart of what the Promax Awards commemorate. We set out to create designs that captured that artistic journey.
For a deeper dive on the themes that inspired this design, check out our post on the Elevation blog: How AI Inspired Elevation to Create the 2023 Promax Awards Opening Sequence.
The journey is the reward
In the world of marketing, the initial catalyst can be a creative brief. But that’s just the spark. The less-celebrated (and sometimes the most difficult) part of a creative endeavor comes in the collaboration phase; the push-pull’s, the back and forths, the kinetic motion that creates an evolution of an idea into its final, glorious form.
How we collaborate to produce the finished product, is often a journey unseen by the general public. Only as creators, when we see a final spot, design, or commercial, can we understand the road that brought it to its destination (the meetings, the pivots). The process is what we’re all really celebrating, and that’s the love letter we wanted to create for Promax’s 2023 Awards.
Our creative journey kicked off with inspiration from kinetic sculptures. They instantly captured our imagination because they’re such a perfect visual metaphor. Set into graceful motion by even the smallest push, these dynamic artworks offered a visual embodiment of the artist's journey – constantly evolving, propelled by balance and thoughtfully crafted design. This concept served as a central visual motif for the entire project.
Eyes on the prize
An important piece of our visual exploration was the “23.” Combining the rounded serif with the thin geometric lines for the “2” and having it intertwine with the modern, modular “3.” We wanted to capture a balance between tradition and modernity and show how different styles can fit together to make something new.
Our 2023 Promax Awards Branding comprises 6 core elements that can be combined and varied to tell a story about the artistic journey: Idea, Iteration, Muse, Window, Type, Light.
Carried everywhere from social graphics to the Awards open, it’s within this design formula that we begin to see the visualizations of inspiration, of pushing the boundaries, of cross-interpretations. We created visual metaphors that are expressed through materials, shapes, textures, and color, such as distortion to convey iterative metamorphosis or fluid transparent glass to convey the overlap and spread of ideas.
One of the biggest challenges lay in designing for not one, but five distinct Promax Awards shows, each requiring unique yet cohesive themes. With light being one of our core design elements, we decided to differentiate each region’s design by mirroring the phenomenon of a prism refracting white light into individual colors.
Each region was assigned a specific color scheme, with the Global Excellence awards symbolized by bright white light, reflecting the combined diversity of all regional awards.
We had a team of four artists collaborating on this project. Leveraging a diverse toolkit, including Cinema4D, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Xparticles, and Redshift, our team produced a vast array of deliverables.
This comprehensive package featured everything from social media posts and stories on Instagram to on-screen graphics, along with high-impact awards show opening sequences.
And the winner is…
Crafting the visuals for this year's Promax Awards has been so fulfilling creatively. It’s always a thrill to see static images and conceptual themes get transformed and realized into full motion.
We're grateful to the ever-professional and positive team at Promax for the opportunity to share our work on their stage. They’ve been a joy to collaborate with.
Congratulations to all nominees and winners!
Credits
Client: PromaxBDA
President: Stacy La Cotera
Manager, Creative Services: Kayla Karlsson
Creative Project Manager, Awards: Megan Kessler
Production Company: Elevation
President/Executive Producer: Steph Carson
Executive Creative Director: Stephen Cocks
Art Director: Dianne Frisbee
Creative Director: David Hendrix
Senior Designer, Animator: Sean Kiley
Designer, Animator: Brendan Pritchett