Opportunity
Through our creativity we make sense of our world. Our capacity to create thrives when there are no boundaries, no borders and no limits. It is inclusive and diverse, it is individual and cultural, it is local and global but most of all it is free to everyone.
Through 2017 we witnessed a year in which worldviews turned inwards and the social mediastream started to overflow with confused, divisive opinions. As an initiative housed within Fabrik's community outreach, I recognised an opportunity for a new way of supporting and championing creative and artistic thought.
We built Fresh to realize and nurture a new way to reward creativity.
My Scope
Co-Founder & CEO
—Fabrik
Brand & Marketing
—Brand Strategy, Mission & Vision
—Brand Identity
—Campaign Promotional Design
—Sponsors & Partnerships
—Awards Design & Delivery
Digital Community Development
—Awards Programme Strategy
—Digital Properties & Submissions Design
—Judging & Scoring Criteria
—Team Management
—Programme Management
Programme Summary
Our mission was to support and celebrate talent. We used our platform to empower aspiring creatives to share their work with a global community, regardless of where they live, work, or what they’re creating. The awards were an opportunity for fresh creative voices to shape our culture and future.
As well as our awards, Fresh was designed to showcase important and forthcoming trends within the creative industries and in the way we generate and consume creativity. This is a core value that helps us form insights, patterns and concepts from the entire pool of entries.
—Fresh 18
Fresh 18 showcase saw 75 winning entries from more than 1600 approved entries. Fresh celebrated 19 gold, 29 silver and 27 bronze winners, including outstanding entries from Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, Pierre Fudaryli, Shiouwen Hong and Anthony Capristo; artists that are challenging and reimagining the human condition at the juxtaposition of technology and art.
Fresh 18 showcased the work of more than 200 creatives with each dip back into the entries pool - building a significant, permanent record of the culture we live in.
—Fresh 19
The second year of the programme introduced a new Carbon award to showcase notable work that scored above award grade within creative categories. With a total of 126 winning entrants from 1500+ entries, Fresh celebrated 11 gold, 24 silver, 25 bronze winners and 99 carbon winners. Featuring gold awards for John Robert Brown, Mike Fisher, David Mrugala, Boris Seewald, Aiste Stancikaite and Jan Vrhovnik.
—Curator Series
As a dedicated initiative run by Fresh's editorial team, Curator Series served to proactively surface both rewarded and unrewarded work from the entries pool to form trend insights throughout the year between awards. As a way to celebrate more creative work and to energise the judging body, Curator Series encouraged inquisitive exploring through the pool of submitted works with one eye on the horizon.
Fresh 18
Supported by a series of visual assets created for Fresh 18 by 3D designer Shannon Hoyne, the system runs two parallel moods sharing one skeleton. The first is dark and electric: charcoal grounds, pixel-dispersion textures, draped 3D forms, with acid green and magenta hitting hard against the black. The second is soft and editorial: blush and bone backgrounds, rose-gold wireframes, marbled gradients, palm shadows, and mint accents. Both lean heavily on rendered sculpture, generous negative space and a gallery-like sense of restraint; the imagery does the heavy lifting so the typography can stay still.
The logo is the calm anchor that holds both worlds together. Set in Helvetica Neue Italic, the wordmark in regular weight beside the numerals in a heavier italic cut, with a macron over the E that works as a typographic signature and linkes to the website URL. A Swiss workhorse in italic - rather than a custom display type - keeps the mark disciplined and readable at any scale; the italic gives it forward motion, the macron gives it ownership.
Generating interest
Early creative direction for the programme focussed on a simple call to actions over the F18 assets.
Prior to promoting the awards, our first task for the initiative was to bake in Fresh's mission and start building a judging and advocates group through creative community and platform connections.
2017
Building a community
Ready for submissions
To capture creators at home across the holidays and during cold winter days, Fresh was slated to go live in early January - just in time for new year reslutions.
Fresh's first phase site was a message of intent and a submissions vehicle to enable creators to submit work through the submissions window.
2017
Building a presence
Every participant acknowledged
Fresh was not an initiative that came with funding. From the outset I had to consider how we'd reward judges and winners alike for their contributions without a budget.
The first gift was a unique hand-printed poster to mark the judging panel. Screenprinted after-hours in East London with the amazing help of Joe Gibson Studio and G.F. Smith papers, the initial run formed the basis of how we'd mark the awards to come.
2018
Building rewards
Fresh Future is an ambitious project but the message is simple; to level the playing field. Creativity has no boundaries, no borders and no gender. Fresh 18 is a new start.
To promote the call for entries a series of carousel posts were built out and shared widely to creative audiences. Partnership communities at Ello, Working Not Working, Creative Mornings and Glug also carried the message further - using the No Borders assets to head up editorial and promotional material.
After judging and winners announcements a series of promo posts we built out for each genre's gold-winning work. As Fresh stepped from a direct awards programme towards it's permanent phase as a showcase and record of the work, these promos served to bring new creative eyes to the site and build an audience for reviewing the work and drawing inspiration from it.
Building on the work i'd already done in creating unique screen-printed posters for the judging panel, I wanted to use our partnership with G.F. Smith to produce a series of limited run screen-prints that personally reflected each award winning gold, silver and bronze creator alongside the category they won.
Sourcing A2 gold, silver and bronze metallic papers from the Peregrina Majestic range, I designed a two-colour screen-print for each award group using a shared solid black layer along with a spot varnish layer for each award group - making the gold, silver and bronze posters each unique to their group.
Printed with Alasdair Manson of Manson's Press in Hackney Wick, these posters formed the centrepiece of the awards package sent to each awarded creator. They remain an astonishingly beautiful token of the inaugural year's work. it was a great pleasure to receive photos of the posters in situ by the creators over the course of the year.
Fresh 19
Taking learnings from across the year since Fresh 18 was launched, it was necessary to simplify some of the scope for it's second year. Presented as F19 to build recognition from thumbnail format upwards.
Fresh Future was built on a simple vision statement: Advocate for the new. This statement informed the mission for the awards and showcase initiative and framed the messaging that united both the judging group and the entry group.
By delivering hard-copy mission statements to both these groups in the printed material we sent them, the initiative had a foundational purpose from which to build on. For F19 the original mission statement was retained and simplified.
Free to enter and open to all creatives F19 was the largest and most relevant global creative awards initiative to discover and celebrate outstanding talent; recognising creativity regardless of boundaries, borders and gender. F19 was a call to empower new visionaries, to championing creativity and an opportunity for fresh creative voices to shape our culture and our future.
For the artistic direction of the year's awards I wanted to bake in the gold, silver and bronze award symbology and build an aesthetic around precious metals - which we could deliver on through the award phase. I asked Fresh 18 graphic design category winner Owen Gildersleeve to create an original series of paper sculptures that encapsulate the rare minerals aesthetic. Along with photographer Chris Hoarse, Owen built paper-based scenes with low-poly style folded geometric shapes and coal-black organic backgrounds.
I then adopted the low-poly aesthetic in wireframe format to produce an iconic for the awards materials.
Carrying on from the rare minerals theme I adopted a topographic background asset that included unique river/vein detailing for each of the proposed award and judging groups - resulting in five topographic backgrounds to cover gold to bronze, carbon and judge presentation materials. In use, this detail suggested a 'fingerprint' aesthetic to position material within each group as unique and individual.
Saying less
With simplified messaging, supporting promotional assets played into the intrigue of pushing less explanation and instead relying on the inquisitive nature of it's audience to learn more about the initiative and take part.
2018
Delivering the call to entries
For the F19 award posters I had five unique groups to design for, including the judging group. It was important to move forward from the Fresh 18 posters but retain a sense of family. Using the F19 visual assets as a starting point, the poster design doubled-down on the rare mineral theme and used top-down topographic assets on the backing layer as a spot varnish layer - with the participant names cut into the same layer.
Working once more with G.F. Smith on the poster stock I chose Plike black and white 240gsm papers to use as the base. Alasdair Manson politely agreed to help out on the print of this run. Laid down before the varnish was a metallic paint for each of the gold, silver and bronze groups, and flat black paint for carbon. I wanted to contrast the judges group away from the winners group, so opted for a flat fluorescent yellow ink Alasdair found.
Collected together the three black and two white posters served as a stunning cohort of creative names across the second year's initiative.
Fresh 20
Towards the end of 2019 I worked with 3D artist Prateek Vatash to deliver a series of visual assets for F20 that would provide the aesthetic cornerstone for the initiative for it's third year. During the process of preparing the digital properties for F20 it became obvious that global events were transpiring against making this happen.
Pandemic uncertainty brought with it the reality that many creative people were facing a new existential threat to their livelihoods and the way they work. Against a backdrop of considerable anxiety across the creative industries we decided to pause development of the Fresh Future programme - unable to guaranteed we'd have cohorts to satisfy the judging requirements, or be able to reach creative audiences that were in a position to share and celebrate their creativity against the noise of an increasingly serious global concern that was being handled differently across nations.
Prateek's four award group hero images were an evolution of F19's rare minerals aesthetic - tying his signature geometric style to the raw materials of the initiative to super result. It's a shame we weren't able to do anything with them.
Executive Summary
Built from scratch as a discovery mechanic for Fabrik in 2017, Fresh Future was a global creative awards initiative to find, reward and amplify new creative talent at a moment when the wider culture was turning inwards. The premise was simple: creativity does its best work when it is free to everyone, regardless of geography, discipline or career stage. I assembled a judging panel of over 100 creative leaders and curators, including members of the senior creative team at Twitter, Facebook, Adobe, VSCO and Ello, to form the largest reviewing body ever put together for a free awards showcase. Structured around gold, silver, bronze and (from year two) carbon awards across the major creative categories, with up to 240 winning entries possible per year.
With Fabrik as primary partner and backed by additional partnerships with Ello, Glug, Creative Mornings, Working Not Working, G.F. Smith and Kitbash 3D, we awarded 75 winners with free portfolio sites to bring new voices to Fabrik, and 25 of the winning creatives were folded back into the editorial team as curators to help surface more work from the entries pool.
Over two cohorts the programme drew more than 3,000 entrants and built a permanent record of over 400 awarded works. Fresh 18 selected 75 winners from 1,600+ approved entries including Sevi Iko Dømochevsky, Pierre Fudaryli, Shiouwen Hong and Anthony Capristo. The second year introduced the Carbon award and selected 126 winners from 1,500+ entries, with gold going to John Robert Brown, Mike Fisher, David Mrugala, Boris Seewald, Aiste Stancikaite and Jan Vrhovnik.
Between award cycles, the Curator Series kept the programme alive with an editorial run that dipped back into the entries pool to surface rewarded and unrewarded work alike, read emerging trends and energise the judging body.
The awards package was anchored by limited-run A2 screen-printed posters I designed for each winner group: two-colour prints on unique paper stocks to each award tier, pulled by Alasdair Manson at Manson's Press and Joe Gibson from Joseph Gibson Studio during our studio period in Hackney Wick.
