custom awards

how to clean and look after your custom awards

Receiving custom awards is special. Custom awards are a symbol of your hard work, dedication and success.

They provide a physical object that can be looked back at for you to reflect on your feelings of pride and delight. That’s why our awards are designed to be timeless - allowing you to value them long into the future.

But in order to maintain the premium aesthetic and high-quality that comes with the awards from Watson Design, it’s important that they’re properly taken care of. 

Each of our awards are crafted with care, a meticulous attention to detail and the personal touch of our talented design team. Here’s a few pointers to help keep these beautiful tokens of appreciation and success in the condition they arrived:

  1. When it’s time to clean, stick to a soft cloth and a little water.

  2. Avoid using Windex, solvents, or any strong detergents. They can be harsh on the materials we work with and damage the custom prints.

  3. It’s best to keep out of direct sunlight to prevent fading.

  4.  Give wooden awards a little love by replenishing with natural wood oil.

  5.  Printed surfaces will wear if rubbed on tables or desks.

  6. And finally, remember to be gentle and handle with care.

These six simple steps show that looking after our custom awards is easy. Regular cleaning will ensure that they continue to look beautiful while proudly displayed on your desk, shelf or mantlepiece and will remain a testament to your achievements.

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.

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

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“‘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. 

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supporting the invention convention with our awards

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For several years Andrew Watson Design has proudly been the award provider for the Invention Convention Americas — the culminating program for top young inventors from national programs in Mexico and the United States.

So often the awards and trophies that children receive lack creativity, modern designs and personalization.

Instead, they’re awarded generic, cheap and lackluster products that struggle to generate the same feeling of appreciation and recognition as a unique custom award. For the Invention Convention, we wanted to change that.

Our goal was to create a final product using sustainable and eco-friendly materials that would create a sense of pride and accomplishment for the young inventor’s innovation and entrepreneurship.

Implementing contemporary concepts, we developed a collection of custom made awards and medals to help show genuine and thoughtful reward for the work of the winners.

Avoiding a classic trophy shape, the awards feature blonde and caramel bamboo, sanded smooth and finished with a natural Danish oil. Anodized aluminum compliments the wood to create a modern abstract award, with UV prints applied to hit the branding and personalization requirements. 

The Invention Convention ‘envisions a world in which all young learners have access to innovation, invention and entrepreneurial learning to gain the confidence and skills to control their own destiny to help shape a better future’.

We hope that by delivering beautiful bespoke awards, we can help inspire confidence and future success by making the awardees feel special for their achievements.

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crafting awards for the winter dew tour 20th anniversary

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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 awards for nutaku

Nutaku custom awards for employee recognition

Nutaku custom awards for outstanding achievements

Watson Design was tasked with crafting custom awards for Nutaku to celebrate outstanding achievements within their company and recognize employee success. Nutaku commissioned Watson Design to create high-quality, custom trophies that reflected their brand and remained completely bespoke. 

The awards were assembled using aluminum tubes with anodized aluminum. These materials combined with the print and design of the awards worked in unison to deliver a harmonized design. The angular lines of the award are echoed in the subtle geometric gloss print that wraps around, inviting the viewer to inspect each side. This adds depth and captures light in a playful manner as it bounces from one line to another. Working with aluminum tubing was not simple and required meticulous work to sand, finish and cap each end before assembling without any visible fixings. Each award was custom made following Nutaku’s style guide and personalized with different numbers, categories and names. 

In order to create an exquisite employee appreciation gift - in line with Nutaku’s corporate identity - Watson Design employed a variety of machinery and range of printing techniques including wide format flatbed, screen printing and sublimation. Watson Design specialize in the custom design and creation of unique hand-crafted awards.


custom dew tour awards for des moines streetstyle skateboard competition

Dew Tour Des Moines custom winners trophies

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.


hockey canada - custom hall of fame awards

hockey canada hall of fame award

Over the next few weeks we will be sharing some of our favourite projects from 2016.

The project above was a commission from Hockey Canada. We were requested to design a hall of fame award for their new inductees. The idea behind the design was to use the shape of 4 hockey stick handles and create the award around that size. The four sticks can be seen through the maple leaf relief cut, designed as a "peekaboo" detail. The wood was then affixed in-between two water jet cut aluminum panels. A modern design that is simple and elegant. 

The first recipient was Scott Niedermayer, he is a Canadian former ice hockey defenceman and current Special Assignment Coach of the Anaheim Ducks. He played 18 seasons and over 1,000 games in the National Hockey League (NHL) for the New Jersey Devils and Anaheim Ducks. Niedermayer is a four-time Stanley Cup champion and played in five NHL All-Star Games.  

wilson - major league baseball trophies

wilson sporting goods defensive player of the year

We were honoured this year to create a series of custom trophies for Wilson Sporting Goods. The trophies were being awarded to Major League Baseball players for the Defensive Player of the Year awards. We created 12 of these in different colours and also custom designed a glove stand to match the trophies. 

The Wilson Defensive Player of the Year trophies stand 2' (605mm) tall and 4" (101mm) square. Created from aluminium, a embossed leather winners swatch was inset into the trophy. Silk screened with white and metallic inks, these trophies are big and impressive! 

gap clothing - custom awards

GAP clothing awards trophies custom not glass or crystal corporate

We were given a short timeline (2 weeks) to design and create some awards for GAP Clothing. The brief was to create something less corporate and more 'crafty'. The result was these amazing string art awards that were custom designed and handcrafted to represent the textile industry. 

We used embroidery string for the centre feature and finished the inside and outside of the award in denim fabric. A tactile textile finish was contrasted against a minimal anodised aluminium finish to create a modern look. 

eco perpetual awards/trophies

eco sustainable perpetual awards and trophies Pine Beetle Wood denim pine

We can customise all of our award designs to suit any event. The design above is our 'Classic' design but, we created it in three different sizes for the clients particular needs; perpetual award ceremonies. With the largest award measuring almost 4" square (101mm), we made the other awards proportionally smaller. This particular design was created from recovered Pine Beetle Wood (denim pine) for an eco event. 

This is a great example of our flexibility and ability to fulfil any client request. Most standard trophy / award shops will buy product from a catalogue with set designs and sizes. We custom design and handcraft every award ourselves so, we have the capacity to create anything our clients desire.

When it comes to corporate recognition we are able to deliver the best products on the market. With original, modern and meaningful designs, our designers are able to create custom awards and trophies that make an impression and deliver on our clients specific communication goals. 

let’s discuss your awards