Redesigning the digital ecosystem for Cannes Lions and its regional award festivals.
Modernising a 70-year-old icon: A digital transformation for LIONS events and awards portfolio.
Categories
Multi-brand
Events & Awards
Design system
Activities
Workshops
User flows
IA
UX
UI
Interaction
The jewel in the LIONs crown. The Cannes Lions Festival site.
Role
As my first project upon joining LIONS, I was tasked with leading a comprehensive overhaul of the four primary event and award sites.
The complexity was significant: each site had its own unique stakeholders and business requirements, and a brand-new CMS was being rolled out in parallel.
Over eight months, I led the UX and Design across all phases—redefining the digital experience and engineering a unified underlying design system.
Left: Capturing the core moments across the festival phase.
Cannes Lions is the world’s most prestigious advertising festival, a global benchmark for excellence for over 70 years. However, while the physical awards represent the pinnacle of creativity, the digital experience had fallen behind.
We mapped the lifecycle of our core users to understand their interactions during the high-stakes "Awards Season.
One of the goals of the project was to create more alignment between the brands. During the audit + discovery phase, I hosting a series of stakeholder workshops and gathered existing site data to help inform what to keep verses what to kill.
Creating a global site structure based on a combination of all required features, with rules defined for how to scale the experience back for smaller events.
The goal was to create a shared foundation that allowed for individual brand expression while utilising shared patterns for common features.
This ensured a cohesive suite of sites that remained consistent across four brands, multiple teams, and various 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
