the art of creating unique awards: custom design for lacework

How do you create a unique award?

Recognition and reward is a special act that provides a sense of value between those rewarding and those being rewarded. When recognizing someone with an award, that sense of value can be enhanced if it is truly unique. But, there is an art to crafting awards that are beautifully striking, and distinct from traditional trophies and plaques.

To be unique is to be unlike anything else. When creating awards, this means developing new, exciting concepts and using different materials creatively to produce an individual, modern trophy design.

Working with Lacework, we developed a custom shape before incorporating an interesting mixed material approach to bring the design to life — including our inaugural use of a special holographic film.

An elegantly shaped piece of clear acrylic with an alluring chamfered edge makes up the main body. Finished with diamond polishing, we added the holographic film to the rear to create a dazzling, multi-colored effect and the perception of stained glass. The magical colors reflect the Lacework brand and ensure that the awards vibrantly stand out. 

Contrasting the vivid material on top, smoky charcoal colored cast concrete with a rough natural finish provides a solid base down below. Combining such different materials helps to achieve a finished product that is both contemporary and independent, while the varying colors and textures complement each other beautifully.

Laser engraving to the concrete and UV prints to the acrylic augments the custom element to these awards and meets Lacework’s branding requirements with the addition of their logo and name.

The outcome is a unique award, designed to reward and recognize — and provide a sense of value towards Lacework employees.

celebrating eight years of awards for inductive automation: ignition community conference

ICC awards over the years

“‘When the customer comes first, the customer will last’”

— Robert Half

At Watson Design we’re committed to delivering exceptional service for our clients and pride ourselves on the relationships we’ve built. After working with us once, many clients have returned multiple times to receive the same high standard for recurring awards and events.

Inductive Automation's Ignition Community Conference (ICC) gathers the industrial world’s brightest minds at one event — and we’ve had the pleasure of creating the awards for it over the last eight years. 

Client collaboration is a major part of our design process. Starting with initial concepts through to the final awards, we work closely with clients to ensure the finished product is distinctly unique, striking and customized to suit their high-level corporate branding requirements. 

Pictured above and below are the eight awards we’ve crafted for the ICC. Based on the brief set, we developed completely new designs with bespoke branding to match the event theme each year.

From wood, metal, acrylic and meganite, to 3D and UV flatbed printing, anodizing, laser cutting and many more, we’ve utilized a whole range of different materials and production techniques over the years. The result? A wide collection of vibrantly decorated, unique, custom trophies - fit for rewarding the amazing success of the winners.

Each year has been a progression of skill and elements, and the awards have continued to grow in terms of design and complexity. The 2023 Firebrand award is a true reflection of the pinnacle of awards and trophies that we’re capable of crafting at Watson Design. 

ICC aims to elevate skills, exchange ideas, share knowledge and provide inspiration from industry leaders who are changing industrial applications and operations. We’re delighted to have supported the event through our award designs over the past eight years and plan to continue our relationship with Inductive Automation and ICC into the future, as we now begin designing the fall 2024 awards. 

2023 ICC Firebrand awards

designing and creating 30" light up trophies for activate games

How do I get my name on that?

That’s the question we set out to get Activate Games’ customers asking when we embarked on creating one of our biggest, and most intricately detailed, trophy designs to date. 

Activate set us a brief to develop an in-facility trophy that would not only catch the eye of visitors and potential Tournament of Champions (TOC) competitors, but leave them eager to compete. 

The world’s first active gaming facility, Activate allows participants to become the player and compete inside dynamic game rooms with interactive technology. 

Stretching across North America at Activate’s participating locations, The Tournament of Champions provides top players the chance to compete for the ultimate champion title, cash prizes and their name on our standout awards.

Acting as a display piece, we designed 30” light up trophies by integrating LEDs for emphatic effect. The inclusion of lights in the design helped with cohesion between product and real-life activity, as lights play a large role in Activate’s game modes and the TOC.

We opted for meganite as the structural base for the trophies, with matte anodized aluminum on each side to make up the unique shape. The dark metal provides the perfect contrast to the shine of the LED lighting and enabled us to apply detailed UV flatbed printing to add a large TOC logo.

Intertwined with the meganite and aluminum is clear acrylic with frosted edges. This is where the LEDs are applied to brighten the Activate text and logos that have been laser engraved onto the material. 

Activate’s brief stated that they plan to open more locations over the next 10 years, requiring more awards. So, the whole creation process involved future proofing the design — including a removable panel enabling the LEDs to be easily be replaced. The panel features 10 place spots for future winners with the removable element allowing new winners to be updated after 10 years.

It was crucial to consider how to power the LEDs. After plenty of trial and error, we decided to use a regular power outlet with a plug point located on the rear side of the awards. 

At Watson Design we specialize in the custom creation of modern awards, trophies, gifts and plaques. We had lots of fun designing and crafting these striking and elaborate trophies which now stand proudly in every Activate facility, eagerly awaiting the engraving of the next champion’s name.

Want to see more of these awards? Check out our Instagram reel showcasing the design process.

andrew watson design emerges triumphant in the 2024 new york product design awards

We’re thrilled to be announced as a silver winner of the 2024 New York Product Design Awards. From a pool of over 1,000 submissions, our design was chosen amongst the winners and was deemed exceptional by the judging panel.

Our custom Dew Tour awards crafted for the Des Moines street style skateboard competition were entered into the Figures and Statues category. We're delighted to win the honor of receiving a NY Product Design Award and for the hard work, skill and dedication of our amazing team to be recognized on such a reputable scale.

Dew Tour Des Moines is one of the most high-profile skating events in the world where only the most prolific sponsored skateboarders compete. We were commissioned to design and create custom winners trophies that reflected the Dew Tour brand, event theming and skateboarding aesthetic.

As experienced creators of custom awards, trophies and gifts, we understood the responsibility of creating a product that was completely on brand, professional and compelling. It is hugely rewarding to see that our work was not only appreciated by Dew Tour, but also stood out triumphantly and captivated the attention of a diverse and esteemed judging panel within the world of product design. 

Created to honor and elevate product designers whose innovations enhance our world, the NY Product Design Awards embody a commitment to recognizing excellence. Open to professionals and enthusiasts alike, the competition underscores the significance of product design in today's interconnected and evolving landscape of consumption.

Recently we worked with Dew Tour again to custom design and handcraft the awards for the Winter Dew Tour 20th Anniversary at Copper Mountain, Colorado.

Interested in some BTS content? Check out the Instagram reel we put together during the creation process of the award winning trophies.

crafting awards for the winter dew tour 20th anniversary

At Andrew Watson Design, it’s fair to say we’re all pretty into our snow sports. As a small awards business based in the beautiful mountains of British Columbia, just a short drive from the world renowned Whistler Blackcomb, it’s rather hard not to be. So when we were commissioned to design and create winners trophies for the prestigious 2024 Winter Dew Tour event - at the famous Copper Mountain, Colorado - we were eager to get started and bring the awards to life. 

An anniversary year, the 2024 Winter Dew Tour was a 20 year celebration of skiing and snowboarding. We knew the importance of creating unique, standout awards that captured the essence of freestyle snow sports and incorporated Dew Tour’s vibrant and playfully outlandish branding. Working from a clean slate, we custom designed and handcrafted awards completely distinctive to the event and Dew Tour brand. 

Copper Mountain was host to a mind blowing display of action throughout the weekend and we are proud to have supported such an incredible event, and to see our awards in the hands of the amazing winners. Each award included a brushed aluminum rod, to create a subtle handle for recipients to showcase the full award upon the podium — allowing Dew Tour’s dazzling colorway and gripping graphics to take center stage. Understanding the importance of high-level corporate branding, we employed UV flatbed printing to create a D shaped neon green back print, accompanied by Dew Tour’s trademark punchy purple and brand logo.

Andrew Watson Design is delighted to have worked with Dew Tour previously for the 2022 Des Moines street style skateboard competition and we hope to continue this relationship to craft fun and flamboyant awards for exciting events in the future.

custom dew tour awards for des moines streetstyle skateboard competition

Custom winners trophies at the 2022 Dew Tour Des Moines

Watson Design was tasked with crafting custom awards for the Dew Tour Des Moines streetstyle skateboard competition — one of the most high-profile skating events in the world where only the most prolific sponsored skateboarders compete. Dew Tour commissioned Watson Design to design and create custom winners trophies that reflected their brand, event theming and skateboarding aesthetic. 

Seeking a dynamic design, Watson Design implemented a mixed-media approach to the awards using a combination of materials that included maple plywood, skateboard grip tape, semi translucent green acrylic, anodized aluminum and solid surface (meganite). Requiring five contrasting materials to be reliably printed on - including the unorthodox grip tape - the project pushed the boundaries of wide format printing and brought challenges to ensure the materials worked together to create a cohesive design. The final product successfully combined all the materials without displaying fixings to create a clean, unique and enterprising award that matched the brand style guide and brief set by Dew Tour. 

Almost 50 individually different custom awards were developed for this project utilizing Watson Design’s thorough methodology process and expertise in the creation of unique, handcrafted, custom designed trophies, awards and plaques.