Artpreciate Creative Awards

Overview

I designed the trophy for the Artpreciate Creative Awards 2025 and built a set of 3D scenes to launch it. The award is three panes of clear glass with the Artpreciate mark cut through them, set into a navy base printed with the awards name and the year.

The challenge

An award has to feel worth winning in a photo and on a stage. The glass had to read clearly on screen, where clear objects tend to disappear, and the scenes had to place it in a creative world rather than a trophy cabinet.

Approach

1. The trophy is built from three offset glass panes, so the mark reads in layers and catches light at every edge. The navy base carries the type: the awards name on one face and a large "25" for the year on the other.
2. For the launch I made a sequence of scenes: a designer's desk where the mark appears among the papers, the glass panes sliding together against deep blue curtains, the trophy lowered into a pink and violet plaza of stepped walls and stairs, and a curved monitor glowing in a bright studio.
3. Glass is hard to render against plain backgrounds, so most shots use textured settings, terrazzo, curtains and stucco, that give the panes something to refract.
4. I modeled and rendered the scenes in Blender and Cinema 4D and put them together in After Effects.