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Grand One

Building a Visual Brand for Finland's Biggest Digital Media Competition

Grand One is Finland’s biggest competition in digital media, covering the following areas: marketing, communications and content, data and innovation, and design and user experience -a true design festival where the most talented people and cases meet every year. Wunderdog’s Design team did the complete visual branding for the 2023 competition and award ceremony together with an interactive digital installation for the gala.

The client's brief was clear and open: create a trendy, playful, and festive visual identity that could inspire people to participate in the competition and enjoy the gala. In addition to an identity aligned with this vision, Wunderdog created a digital interactive installation for the yearly Grand One Gala.

Winning concept: a candy-coated branding

Wunderdog Designer Graziano Monteleone describes the selected brand concept as a “candy party”: a magic world showcasing the visual identity of Grand One with simple shapes, bold colors, and moving textures. The branding was used on Grand One's website, social media, animations, and venue screens.

For the gala, a team of developers and designers from our Helsinki, Berlin, and Málaga offices tested AR/VR elements for a start. This co-creation process expanded the research and the final solution took its shape as an innovative digital installation. This installation offered a new way to experience Grand One's visual identity through movement, allowing award ceremony guests to dance in front of it, have fun with shapes that react to movement, and encourage them to share their experience in their social networks.

"Wunderdog presented us with three concepts for this year’s identity, they were all winners and it was really hard to pick just one. We’ve also been mesmerized by Designer Teemu Vilén’s animation skills and we could not have been happier with the results."
Jani Järvinen,
Producer, Grand One

Dancing with a digital brand

Wunderdog's digital installation detects human figures and poses in a manner similar to Augmented Reality (AR). However, AR's interactive experience merges the real world and computer-generated content, whereas our solution does not combine digital content with the real world.

The shapes cascade on an idle screen. When a person steps into the scene, it gets recognized by a camera using Google Mediapipe’s open source Machine Learning solution to recognize the person. Projected as a "bubble mascot", the person can interact with the falling shapes bouncing them off.

The project presented a true co-creative challenge that pushed our developers and designers out of their comfort zones. It is often said that the best creativity and innovation emerge when we step outside of our comfort zone – and this was no exception.

The Grand One project demonstrates how far technology has come. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an Artificial Intelligence chatbot. To speed up and accelerate development, ChatGPT was employed by our team to assist in areas where the desired outcomes were unclear.

Open-minded experimentation

One of Wunderdog's core values is centered around the concept of "Courage to Improve," which encourages our people to be bold and open-minded when it comes to experimentation. The Grand One project shows how a tech-powered organization can empower its innovative capabilities to co-create something new in branding and digital experiences. We are not scared to try out new things. Usually, AR/VR productions are considered to require a lot of special expertise, but we proved that success is possible by joining forces and having the right attitude to test and try out new things.

Wunderdog also wanted to inspire others with an Open Source solution and share the code so that other projects could benefit from our digital innovation. Read more about how we support the development and accelerate innovation in the IT community through our Open Source Program. Check out the code on our GitHub page!

The Grand One's candy-coated branding and digital gala installation are a testament to the sweet success that can be achieved by stepping out of one's comfort zone.

"Everything has gone super smoothly since the first meeting. There’s always good thinking behind every idea, an eye for detail which we appreciate a lot, and really good craftsmanship."
Jani Järvinen,
Producer, GrandOne

The team behind the solution

The brand design was done by Wunderdog Designers Graziano Monteleone and Teemu Vilén; the 3D design was by Motion Designer Andrea Braga; the animations by Teemu Vilén, and the project management was carried out by Designer Graziano Monteleone with Service Designer Viivi Lehtonen. The digital installation team was powered by Software Developers Matti Kaivanto, Ido Schacham, and Alejandro Brozzo, together with other developers from Wunderdog Berlin and Málaga.

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