UX/Ui Design | Branding | Viasual
Urban Dance Awards
Exclusive career management solutions for professionals football athletes
About the project
Urban Dance Awards 2019 was the first edition of an event build to recognize Portuguese dancers, choreographers, and artists who promoted the urban dances around the globe.
The Event:
In 2019, Jazzy Dance Studios, the biggest dance school in Portugal, in partnership with the Portuguese Association of Hip Hop Dance Crews (APHHDC) presented the first edition of the Urban Dance Awards, held in the multi-purpose pavilion in Odivelas with the partnership and co-organization of the Municipality of Odivelas. The aim of this event is to recognize artists, dancers, and athletes who, within the scope of urban dances, carry out their activity, with proven success, and who in this way honor, develop and promote urban dances in our country, not only nationally, but also internationally.
In this First edition, 24 prizes were awarded, 16 of which were open to the public. The voting process was divided in 2 parts: 50% importance level carried out by an entourage of 100 people, and the rest for the public on the website urbandanceawards.pt
Challenge:
With about 1 month to build an entire event, the team was divided into areas of interest and backgrounds to ensure that the Urban Dance Awards could be held in the best possible quality.
My role:
As the main Graphic Designer and UX/UI designer, I was involved in all phases of the project, from mapping out the problem to delivering final designs. The challenges assumed by me were mainly
- Branding and Visual Communication for the event as well as all its digital and physical graphic materials
- Creation and development of a totally new website that would convey the Visual Identity created in the item above
- Development of an online voting system so that the general public could vote for the chosen candidates
- Event social media management
Tools:
- Sketch
- Illustrator & Photoshop
- Wordpress
design process
Empathize
User Research Competitor analysis Persona Creation
Define
Branding, User Flow, Gathering Requirements, Job Stories
Ideate
Brainstorm, sketches
Prototype
Mid-fidelity Wireframes, High-Fidelity Wireframes
Test
Usability Test
Understanding the users - personas
Since this is an event to recognize dancers, choreographers and arts focused on the urban dances we already knew that this group is already our focus user. Besides that, the event was opened for the public and was going to have a Live Instagram transmission, so this made us realize we had more personas to add: the one interested in the Urban Dances or connected to it somehow. This made us create our new personas:
Dancers, Artists, Choreographers
Nominees for the awards
They live for dancing, are professionals, or are practicing to be. Ages between 12 and 40 years old, got nominated for the awards for being part of a dance crew, solo dancer or choreographer. Portuguese.
Alyssa
24 years old, amateur dancer
Student, passionate about dancing, goes to classes every week and have preferences for Urban Dances like Hip Hop, House, Locking, and Popping. Made great friends from dance class and want to support the dance universe, especially in Portugal, to help it grow and get more recognized around the world.
Julia
53 years old, mother of dancers
Layer, divorced, mother of 3 kids, one of them with 18 years old with a great talent for Hip Hop. Her son is nominated in 2 categories one being part of a big dance crew and other for being part of a small dance crew of 3 people only. Julia supports her son and want to go to the event cheer for him and him.
Definition
After developing the personas, helped me to understand the physical, environmental and emotional state of the user. This process has significantly influenced the development of important design and content decisions:
- transmitting urban dance in all its aspects and still giving a clear notion that this was a gala event
- an appealing, modern, elegant and urban visual identity that conveys the idea of urban dances, cool, modern but without losing the elegance of a gala and awards
- As it is a new event, still unknown to the market, the information on the website should be very clear and direct, easily and quickly understandable by the viewer.
- the voting process should be done entirely digitally with access controlled by email, with the registration of each user who wished to vote
Design References
The team came together to seek references and develop an appealing, modern, elegant, and urban visual identity project that would convey the idea of cool, urban dances, modern but without losing the elegance of a gala and award. After extensive research, MTV's major awards were taken as a graphic inspiration, such as "MTV MIAW", "MTV European Music Awards" and "MTV Video Music Awards" and also the Brazilian award "Multishow Awards", held by Multishow channel.
Visual Identity
After choosing and analyzing references and inspirations, the team began the process of creating a new concept for the first Portuguese dance award event. The final result was a combination of all the necessary characteristics for the event: young, modern, urban, cool, and elegant. The feedback provided by the members of the Urban Dance Awards board was totally positive and approved without any kind of change request. Then, auxiliary materials were developed for the communication of the event like posters, Mupis (outdoor posters), social media materials, printed materials, trophies, etc.
User Flow
The development of a website has become a major priority for the event. This step turned out to be the most challenging phase before before the event, given the fact that it was necessary to create not only the layout of the web pages, but also the navigability, information provision and the online voting system, all this in less than 5 days, the maximum period given. First of all we created a simple user flow, to help us understand how the website and voting system should work.
Wireframes
After defining the overall structure, we quickly had to design the mid-fidelity wireframes of the main pages. Our time was running fast but this step couldn't be jumped.
Visual Design
After finishing the wireframes we moved quickly to the visual design, by now we had only 4 days to finish the visual designs and develop the entire website and voting system in WordPress. Even with all the time pressure, we managed to find the perfect design.
What I have learned from this project
The event was considered a success, with only 1 month for the production of the entire Urban Dance Awards and 3 weeks of publicity and open voting, the event had a digital reach of around 440 thousand people, 20 thousand online votes through the developed website. by 2 thousand voters. On the day of the award, the maximum expected capacity was reached, with the presence of 700 spectators. In the press, 7 articles were published about the event. Below are some of the press releases before and after the day of the event.
This project was one of the hardest work challenges I have ever had. We designed all the visuals and website in less than 2 weeks, worked in an extreme amount of pressure but thanks to teamwork and great communication between all we managed to deliver in a very good way! I have learned that it is possible to deliver a project in a very fast way but because of that we didn't have time to test the website and the system, so we faced a few problems after the official release. This proves how important testing a platform is.
Portfolio
