Introducing the Ahead awards

Sleeper is the leading magazine for global hotel design covering the latest trends, news and projects in this dynamic and constantly evolving sector. After working closely with the team over the past 2 years to help bring their European and Asian design award events to life, they approached us with a challenge to create a whole new brand platform to help widen their circle of activity to other regions around the world. Building on the success of of the European and Asian Awards, the team had the ambition to go spread their reach to represent the most exciting projects happening in the Middle East and the Americas and celebrate the best in class on a global level.

Following a strategic branding and naming process the AHEAD awards were born, a platform to celebrate both design and new hospitality and hotel experience concepts in this rapidly advancing industry. The AHEAD awards are 4 regional heats with the overall best in class winners moving forward to compete for its coveted global award at The AHEAD Biennale.

A united brand

With the brand architecture and name defined our first task was to create an identity for the awards. We wanted to ensure that this new logo-mark would remain connected visually to the Sleeper brand whilst remaining distinct. Bold, memorable and flexible the final brand identity takes its influence from connective structures and prismastic architectural glass and utilises an angular device to reveal different facets of the brand architecture. Each region has a unique colourway which can unite for the global event like a spectrum of light refracting through a prism.

Our brand guidelines framework provides a useful toolkit to enable each region to create collateral that aligns consistently with the parent brand.

We launched the brand with a distinctive animated brand ident that uses the idea of the AHEAD awards trophy as a lens to look through projects across each region. The ident culminates in a reveal of the beautiful crystalline structure of the awards, a design heavily influenced by the brand identity.

Connected user experience

As one of the primary touch-points for the awards the website needed to cater to both potential entrants, attendees and sponsors alike. With the varying needs of the three different personas, it was important to serve the right content to the right people. A UX strategy that would ascertain individual visitor’s needs and serve dynamic content based on these requirements was developed and woven into the site. We created five fully responsive, regional specific sites, one for each awards and all cleverly powered by a single CMS under a single domain name.

This empowered the internal team at Sleeper Magazine to manage each region effortlessly. Fully integrated with Wufoo and Awardsforce the website delivered real and tangible efficiencies for the Sleeper team allowing them to draw focus on delivering each of the exceptional awards. Finally we also ensured that the platform was ready to grow and extend from launch, in line with the ambitious vision of the team.