Product Design Lead | LIONS Events & Awards
Modernising a 70-year-old icon: A digital transformation for LIONS events and awards portfolio.
BACKGROUND.
Cannes Lions is the world's most prestigious advertising festival, a global benchmark for creative excellence for over 70 years. But while the physical awards represented the pinnacle of the industry, the digital experience had been left behind. Four event sites. Four brand identities. One opportunity to set a new standard.
LINKS.
The jewel in the LIONs crown. The Cannes Lions Festival site.
ROLE.
As my first project at LIONS, I led a comprehensive overhaul of the four primary event and awards sites. Each had its own stakeholders, business requirements, and brand heritage, with a new CMS being rolled out in parallel.
Over eight months I led UX and design across all phases: redefining the experience and engineering a unified design system underneath it all.
Left: Capturing the core moments across the festival phase.
DISCOVERY - DELIVERY.
We mapped the full lifecycle of core users across the high-stakes Awards Season, then spent the discovery phase stress-testing what we found.
I ran a series of stakeholder workshops, audited existing site data, and made deliberate calls about what to keep and what to cut. The output was a global site structure flexible enough to power the flagship Cannes Lions experience, and scaled back cleanly for smaller regional events.
UNIFICATION WITHOUT UNIFORMITY.
The goal was a shared foundation that allowed each brand its own voice. Common patterns for common features; distinctive expression everywhere else. One system, consistently delivered across four brands, multiple teams, and several time zones.
Beautiful typography from Dubai Lynx
Organic Shapes from Spikes Asia
We accented the organic nature of the identity, by using bold them for bold image crops.
Trophy outline from Eurobest
End-to-end Journey Pre, Stay, & Post touch points
Mobile screens from Lions, Spikes, and Lynx
NICE WORDS FROM IMPORTANT PEOPLE.
"Behold! A very cohesive suite of shiny websites."
SIMON COOK, CEO LIONS
"We look amazing to the world thanks to your hard work. Super clear and lovely big popping pics and videos. A joy to scroll through."
JENNI MIDDLETON, SVP Editor-in-chief LIONS
RESULTS.
1% Increase in traffic
+1% Reduced bouce rate
Design: Anna Brooks
Development: Dav Sehmi, Jacek Dabkiewicz, Sean Paterson
Product: Sam Stimpson
LIONS Design System
Multi-brand Design System V1.0 - 3.0
LIONS AI Projects
Coming soon…
LIONS Intelligence
Subscription sites / AI Tools
Design and built by Matthew Kempton, 2025
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