City of Atlanta Public Notice Signs
Company Matchstic
Introduction Date August 1, 2017
Project Website https://matchstic.com/work/atlanta-city-public-notice-signs
Why is this project worthy of an award?
To better engage the citizens of Atlanta, the Department of City Planning asked us to redesign their Public Notice signs—eyesores that were difficult to read and understand. Aiming to make the signs more clear and legible, we created a visual hierarchy that distinctly identifies the notices by assigning each one a single letter. The colors reflect the vibrancy of our flourishing city, boldly framing each sign, no matter its backdrop. The new logo and typefaces we implemented for the Department’s rebrand are used on the signs, refreshing and modernizing their look and feel. Altogether, the new system is clear, unexpectedly engaging and flexible for future expansion.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Atlanta is currently seeing a surge in population growth, and with it, a corresponding surge in building and development. Many permits are required, and the signs given out—once a permit is granted—are highly visible around the city. So visible, in fact, that some citizens are taking signs off the street to serve as graphic art in their homes. Additionally, other cities are following suit in rethinking their notice signs—a public service, after all, doesn't have to produce unflattering reminders of their work.
Who worked on the project?
Designers: Brian Nelson (Lead), Courtney Perets Photographer: Aaron Coury Copywriter: Danielle DePiper Creative Director: Blake Howard Strategy Lead: Jason Orme
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Command Line Heroes
Company Red Hat
Introduction Date January 16, 2018
Project Website https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Command Line Heroes is a podcast series featuring documentary stories about IT professionals—developers, system administrators, IT architects—and how they have shaped the technology landscape. It is part of an integrated marketing program working across multiple media platforms, as well as Red Hat-owned web pages and social channels. Given the dramatic nature of our podcast and its focus on IT “heroes,” our art direction was inspired by various historical and global art styles famous for rendering heroic moments. For instance, our 2-part episode on the O.S. Wars was influenced by classical Greek and Roman pottery design. For our episode on the development of Agile, we drew inspiration from Japanese feudal art. As an additional layer, given that our audience is mainly tech professionals, each episode’s central piece of art was also designed as a sticker (used in motion graphics videos on social media and in other still artwork promoting the overall series).
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Our initial baseline goals, by the end of the season 1, was to net 25,000 subscribers and 100,000 downloads across podcast platforms. We achieved this after 6 days in-market. At the end of the first season, we currently have 42,481 subscribers and 358,774 total downloads with listeners in over 156 countries. The series was distributed on every major podcast platform (Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Play, CastBox) and streaming service (Stitcher and Spotify) globally. We feel that the distinctive design aesthetic of the show, and the supporting episode are were huge factors in the success of the program. Our creative was bold, unique and inspiring. Each episode was supported in market by episode-specific artwork, with the designs being applied to podcast platforms, social media promotion, email newsletters, display advertising and more.
Who worked on the project?
RED HAT: Laura Hamyln (content director), Brent Simoneaux (associate content director), Casey Stegman (content lead), Dan Courcy (content strategist), Justin Braun & Jacques Oury (creative strategists), Victoria Lawton (account manager/producer), Nick Burns (art director), Saron Yitbarek (host)
View the project video: https://twitter.com/RedHat/status/956274246514298880
Contours
Company Acrylicize
Introduction Date February 1, 2017
Project Website http://www.acrylicize.com/work/contours/
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Contours is a stunning sculptural installation appears to float in space, emerging from the concrete ceiling in concentric curving lines of white light and wood. The line work is reflected on the surrounding glass and in pools below, giving the effect of ripples expanding throughout the overhead space and encouraging curiosity in viewers. The work celebrates its location whilst simultaneously articulating what the client, Tableau Software does, and presents a warmer, more organic, fluid interpretation of data visualisation. Tableau Software produce interactive data visualisation products that focus on business intelligence. We were given the design challenge to create an artwork that would occupy the huge atrium space at the entrance of their headquarters without obstructing the stunning views of downtown Seattle, across Lake Union. It became apparent that this celebration of nature was deeply ingrained within the culture of the local area, Fremont, and therefore turned out to be the key to the design solution - the contoured lines that make up the composition have been designed to represent the reversed topography of Washington’s most famous landmark: Mount Rainier. The flowing forms look to create a calm energy within the space, and the contours evolve into a drifting gesture that fills the atrium as though the summit was picked up and poured out, slowly filling the space. ‘Contours’ seamlessly marries form and function, acting as the aesthetic centrepiece to the entrance as well as providing lighting to such an integral space.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
We wanted to celebrate the calming and dramatic qualities of the American Northwest landscape. The piece brings the outdoors in, whilst suggesting the sense of curiosity and discovery found at the heart of our fascination with mountain ranges and the conquering of their summits. The craftsmanship of the piece emphasises Tableau’s attention to detail, and the angular nature of the piece encourages the viewer to move around the space and experience the artwork from different viewpoints - an example of this is when you move upward from level two; the piece exhibits a contrasting white light map against the raw concrete. This encourages the viewer to further connects the installation with the sense of intrigue and discovery; two notions which sit at the core of Tableau Software’s data driven products. The overall result is a subtle drama, providing both a sense of stillness and fluid movement that guides people through the space.
Who worked on the project?
Sean Bendell-Whittaker, Lead Design / Shannon Andrews, Project Manager US / John Lenehan, Project Management UK / James Burke, Creative Direction
View the project video: https://vimeo.com/230163003
Cortex: The World’s First AI Workbench
Company CognitiveScale
Introduction Date January 23, 2018
Project Website http://www.argodesign.com/work/cognitive-scale.html
Why is this project worthy of an award?
The promise of machine learning has remained out of reach for many companies. Cognitive computing is still a programmer’s black art, often restricted to a world of PhDs. There simply aren’t enough experts to go around in the many companies that could benefit from these powerful new tools. To address this, augmented intelligence software company CognitiveScale is delivering practical, realistic AI solutions that enterprise customers can deploy today—without an army of machine learning experts in their ranks. Imagine a healthcare invoice processing solution that automatically analyzes incoming invoices against the corresponding purchase order, purchase request, and contractual agreements to automatically identify problematic areas for the accounts payable team, and to cite the evidence behind the recommendations. What was once a tedious, and error-prone manual process now consists of only checking problematic areas and transactions, leaving the team to concentrate on higher value work. Separately, consider a wealth manager who is inundated with more research, emails, and market data that she can process, all the while her clients demand highly personalized service. CognitiveScale’s wealth management AI software ingests vast amounts of structured and unstructured historical and real-time data to provide hyper-personalized insights to clients. This helps advisors to scale their personalized service beyond what was previously possible, providing individualized quantamental financial analysis to each client in the communications medium and frequency that they prefer, and while being kept in check with compliance guardrails on advice and communications. These possibilities are achievable with the Cortex 5 AI Platform, an AI engine designed to deliver a higher-level programming model for the implementation of enterprise AI systems: - AI Platform: Compose and orchestrate AI agents visually with an integrated development environment—your own design studio for custom AI solutions—and optimize performance by ensuring the agents you create serve your key business metrics. - AI Marketplace: A global hub of world-class resources and expertise, Marketplace allows you to strengthen the AI solutions you compose with a searchable library of prebuilt agents, skills, and data sets. Enjoy unprecedented access to AI tools and know-how from the biggest players in the industry and all Cortex 5 users. - AI Systems. Manage and optimize immutable, verifiable AI deployments with a strict chain of custody to ensure transparent and ethical AI behavior. When CognitiveScale needed a partner to conceive of a new way for developers to interact with their AI orchestration tools, argo brought deep user research, design strategy, planning, and tight-knit cooperation to the complex challenge. Together, our teams designed and architected the heart of Cortex 5.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
Cortex breaks down barriers between people who have ideas and the tools that help bring them to life. - Composing custom AI solutions: Weaving together the data-rich and algorithm-complex concepts into a suite of straightforward applications required establishing a new vocabulary of visual and interactive elements, while still providing developers with components that fit into their established workflows and worldviews. Through iterative prototyping, our design and development teams created a suite scaffold that enables not just orchestration, but visual testing, collaboration, and mapping performance to key business indicators. - Optimizing business potential with AI: Even the best intelligent agent will miss the mark if not aligned with business goals. This challenge inspired our design of Performance Manager, a dashboard of tools that visualize agent performance correlated with key performance indicators for the business. Managers can measure the impact of augmented intelligence to optimize efficacy—whether that’s increased revenue or improved patient outcomes. - Building the AI ecosystem: As a new technology, AI has lacked the open community and shared resources of more mature platforms. To promote this important ecosystem, CognitiveScale has assembled the tools and expertise of the most advanced AI thinking in the world through AI Marketplace, a global resource hub. This virtual universe of professional services and prebuilt agents, skills, and data sets empowers users to build their own custom AI solutions leveraging a wealth of syndicated tools and data. In the same way the app store gave us access to all kinds of things we never even knew we wanted, AI Marketplace opens the doors to expert knowledge and custom tools once used to build proprietary AI, making them accessible to all.
Who worked on the project?
Cognitive Scale team argodesign team
View the project video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18oh614uBPWry5TFYSHEKBpAzPhsyLBKj/view
D&AD Signage
Company Turner Duckworth: London, San Francisco & New York
Introduction Date June 1, 2016
Project Website
Why is this project worthy of an award?
Turner Duckworth’s creative response for D&AD’s new signage system embodies the organisation’s mission of stimulating and inspiring the creative community. The exterior signage reflects D&AD’s desire to break boundaries and represent restless creativity by engaging and challenging viewers. Inside, a bespoke set of signs were inspired by D&AD’s iconic yellow hexagon symbol.
What else would you like to share about your design? Why is it unique and innovative?
D&AD is the most respected creative industry awarding body in the world and late 2016 saw them move offices to the creative hotspot of Shoreditch, East London. Situated on a busy street filled with colour and creativity, D&AD’s ambition was to install exterior signage for their building that both reflected the charity’s professional stature but also represented the organisation’s desire to break boundaries and represent youthful creativity. Our response was to begin with D&AD’s mission, stimulating and inspiring a community of creative thinkers to look at things from a different perspective and to solve multiple challenges with one solution. By creating a hand painted anamorphic application of D&AD’s logo on the front of the building we created signage that challenges perception and engages the viewer, encouraging them to solve the puzzle by finding the creative solution and experience the satisfaction of doing so. On the inside of the building we took inspiration from D&AD’s iconic assets and colours to create wayfinding and meeting room signage. We use D&AD’s familiar hexagon in yellow to hold icons for toilets, showers and wayfinding with subtleties including pencil nib-shaped marks. For meeting rooms we adopt a naming system of D&AD’s founders, assigning each a colour from the lineup of award grades. And for wall and window graphic vinyl we play with perspective bending around corners or coming together as one from separate points, continuing the theme from the external anamorphic. Materials are all treated with integrity, echoing the prestigious Pencil awards themselves with gloss wood finishes and attention to detail. The result is an office appropriate for a respected champion of creativity that sits at home in this thriving and forward-looking cosmopolitan area.
Who worked on the project?
Head of Design: David Turner and Bruce Duckworth Creative Director: Paula Talford & Jason Ching Design Director: Miles Marshall Designer: Kristian Shepherd, Chris Simpson Head of Production: James Norris Artworker: James Chilvers Senior Account Manager: Jamie Pearce Installation: Bread Collective Sign Manufacturer: John Anthony Signs
View the project video:
