Canada added two Bronze Lions to its trophy count in Cannes Wednesday night at the 62nd International Festival of Creativity, thanks to work from Leo Burnett and Bruce Mau Design.
Shortlisted seven times, Leo Burnett walked away with one award for “Christmas Wrapping Paper” – specially designed sheets of geometrically creased paper that make it easy to cover oddly shaped objects.
This brings the agency’s award tally to seven, having won in the Direct, Promo & Activation, Glass Lion and Outdoor competitions earlier in the week.
Meanwhile, Bruce Mau picked up bronze for its only shortlisted entry for Sonos’ new brand identity, which jury member Monique Gamache described as “simple” but “brilliant.”
Part of the rebrand included a logo design, the online version of which pulses like sound waves from a speaker when users scroll up and down the page.
Gamache, a design director at Calgary agency Wax, told Marketing the submission itself had relatively few frills – simply boarded and without a case video that accompanies most work.
Catching a glimpse of it on a table among other work, Gamache took a closer look and was struck by what she saw and reintroduced it to the jury for further discussions. The rest as they say… is a bronze.
“When you actually see the Sonos identity and the system they’ve created for it and in the space of the digital realm… I wish I had done that,” she said.
When it came time to select the Grand Prix winner, jury president Andy Payne, global chief creative officer at Interbrand Group said the jury was looking for work that had a sense of scale, lived across multiple touch points, but also demonstrated a brand trying to do some good by solving an issue with design.
“We wanted an idea that design does change things, it does make things better. That’s our job, to make things better, that’s our purpose,” he said during a press conference Wednesday morning.
With those criteria in mind, the jury awarded The Grand Prix to Volvo and Grey London for “LifePaint,” which also took the top prize in the Promo & Activation competition Monday night.
LifePaint was designed to improve safety for cyclists by increasing their visibility at night. The washable spray, which lasts for approximately one week after application, glows brightly in the glare of a car’s headlights, but is invisible otherwise.
“LifePaint is about Volvo owning safety and taking it out of the context of what we would normally do for safety. It was all exceptionally crafted, the illustration in some of the pieces was spectacular and that for me was exciting,” said Gamache, who, after her experience in Cannes has changed the way she looks at design.
Coming into the Festival, Payne asked her and the other 18 jury members to share their personal design philosophies. Before this week, Gamache said her ideals revolved around “simplicity of idea and crafting it in a fresh and unexpected way so that it really breaks through.”
And now, “It’s really about design as changing and making the world a better place. I think from all of the people I’ve been judging with across the world… it’s really exciting to think about design in a different way. In a bigger way.”
Product Design
Though no Canadian agencies made the shortlist, there’s a Canadian connection to the Grand Prix winner in the Product Design competition, which was also announced Wednesday.
“The Lucky Irish Fish Project” – the brainchild of Christopher Charles, a PhD Candidate in biomedical science at the University of Guelph– is designed to help combat iron deficiency in Cambodia, which can lead to illness, fatigue and even death.
Charles traveled to Cambodia to try and tackle the problem, telling villagers to simply place an iron block into the pot as they cook – an idea that left villagers skeptical. It was back to the drawing board. The product was eventually redesigned into the shape of a fish – a symbol of luck in Cambodia – and met with great success.
According to its LuckyIronFish.com, “After just nine months of using the Lucky Iron Fish every day, we saw a 50% decrease in the incidence of clinical iron deficiency anemia, and an increase in users’ iron levels.”
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