Led by executive creative director Stephen Cocks, a compact design and motion team at Elevation in Atlanta crafts a sprawling design system to brand all five 2023 conferences and award shows for Promax.

Stephen Cocks: “Creating this piece celebrating our peers around the world – a group we know has high expectations – was equally exciting and daunting. Our creative direction was sparked by a quote from American writer/artist/philosopher Elbert Hubbard, ‘Art is not a thing, it is a way.’

“With AI art dominating recent headlines, we’ve been asking ourselves a lot of questions about the nature of art. Is art defined by the creator or the end result? Even with AI-generated images and text, art doesn’t just exist. It ‘becomes’ from a process of learning, prompting, interaction and feedback.
 

“Our creative direction was sparked by a quote from American writer/artist/philosopher Elbert Hubbard, ‘Art is not a thing, it is a way.'”

 
“Art happens in the crafting phase. It’s an exhilarating course that takes us on a journey of introspection, all fueled by a sense of curiosity and a drive for betterment. To us, the celebration of that input and collaborative back-and-forth was the heart of what the Promax Awards commemorate. We set out to create designs that captured that artistic journey.

“Carried everywhere from social graphics to the Awards open, we created visual metaphors that are expressed through materials, shapes, textures, and color, such as distortion to convey iterative metamorphosis or fluid transparent glass to convey the overlap and spread of ideas.

“One of the biggest challenges lay in designing for five distinct Awards shows, each requiring unique yet cohesive themes. With light being one of our core design elements, we decided to differentiate each region’s design by mirroring the phenomenon of a prism refracting white light into individual colors.”
 
 

 
Client: Promax
President: Stacy La Cotera
Manager, Creative Services: Kayla Karlsson
Creative Project Manager, Awards: Megan Kessler

Production: Elevation
President/EP: Steph Carson
ECD: Stephen Cocks
Art Director: Dianne Frisbee
Creative Director: David Hendrix
Senior Designer, Animator: Sean Kiley
Designer/Animator: Brendan Pritchett

Toolkit: Cinema4D, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Xparticles, Redshift