ABOUT

Inspired by the Cannes Film Festival, The Cannes Lions Festival is the world's largest festival of creativity in advertising. Over 40,000 entries from all over the world and more than 12,000 delegates attend each year. At the festival, as well as watching entries on big screens, delegates can use one of 300 “Interactive Kiosks” to browse, search and view videos and entries to the award festival.

We were asked to produce a Windows app to be used within each Kiosk, running on a range of touch-screen devices such as Microsoft Surface and All-In-Ones. The world’s most creative people would be using the app so it had to look clean and content focused, operate effortlessly and overcome many technical challenges.

The app needed to feel like a native Windows app, but not alienate visitors who are more familiar with iOS and Android. To achieve this, we used navigation conventions familiar to touch-screen users in general but chose to list entries using Windows’ side-scrolling grid view. This allows the user to browse entries by their images, something that was missing from the previous app.

The design follows Cannes Lions Festival guidelines. But there is an interesting feature in that the colours displayed in the app are configured in a database, allowing the app to be used at additional festivals which have varying brand identities. This even stretches to the colours used in the app’s iconography; an innovative feature in itself.

Although the app only had to target Windows devices, we built the app using their cross-platform methodology. This means it would be easy to develop the app so that it works on additional platforms (Android, iOS) if that were needed in the future; such as if Bring-Your-Own-Device support were needed.

The app had to look compelling and be easy to use, both of which have been achieved. It gives festival delegates the ability to browse Cannes Lions information through an app that boasts some impressive interactions and features. One that's also clean keeping delegates in full control at all times.

For more on the Cannes Lions Festival, including a snapshot of our app in action, please see the official Cannes Lions video below.