The ADC Awards and the One Show needed a campaign to serve as a creative call for entries to the shows themselves. The brief instructed us to come up with a campaign that would attract the attention of the world’s top advertising and design professions—the very audience that wants to win an ADC Award. Our solution was to play into that dream of winning and fulfillment through the use of the iconic imagery of Las Vegas (where people win huge every minute) and the iconography and colors of the ADC Awards Cubes themselves. It’s this collision of icons that fueled the look and feel of the campaign, including the colors of the posters, the language of the lines within the posters, and the typography.

Every element in the materials we created to promote the festival and encourage people to enter comes from the Cube itself. The Cube is the core idea of the design system we created. And in that way, it’s a celebration of the festival. The colors are inspired by the metals representing the categories, with flourishes inspired by Old Hollywood and the ’50s and ’60s in Las Vegas. Our target demo includes all those who work in the fields of design and visual communication who qualify to win an award from the show.

The starting point for our design system was the ADC’s famous and beloved trophy: the Cube. To play against the way the Cube is mostly represented (realistically, photographically and three-dimensionally), we chose to develop a graphic vectorial 2D-illustration style. Every single element of the illustration system is inspired by the square. That’s also why we chose to work with vectorial elements, which make it easier to adapt to whichever format we needed to create, from narrow online horizontal banners to rectangular posters. The color palette was inspired by the cube’s metallic colors—gold, silver and bronze. The vector shapes and solid colors also allowed us to animate each element, keeping a consistent look and feel throughout the work.

The “More Than Luck” campaign resulted in a lift in entries to the award show versus the previous year. Artists and designers from 61 countries entered this year (versus 57 last year), and the number of entries as of this writing has increased by 2.5% compared to last year. Additionally, the campaign resulted in a large number of press articles from around the world, with Adweek, ArabAd, Indian Television and LBB Online choosing to cover the effort.