That Feeling

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the internet, which is as big a deal as it sounds. In late 2022, we were approached to be the official creative partner for the 27th annual event in 2023. It was not long after ChatGPT, Midjourney, and many other generative AI platforms had exploded in popularity. Our goal was to bring the awards show up to speed with the new tech.

SpecialGuest worked closely with the Webby Awards team on the creative direction of the event. We developed designs for all social assets so that Canva, the key sponsor of the event, could get the word out for nominees. Lake Buckley of media production company 1stAveMachine co-directed the keynote video with SpecialGuest co-founder Aaron Duffy.

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The Webby Awards is about creativity on the internet, so we knew AI would be a big topic. But we also knew that AI is a fraught subject, both exciting and scary—especially for creative people.

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So, we decided that the theme, brand identity, and keynote video should focus on that conversation by posing a question to the community: How do you feel about all this? From that prompt came the event title, That Feeling, intended to capture our elusive feelings about AI.

The campaign focused on the complex feeling we have about AI and used AI to bring that feeling to life. In the concepting stages, we used AI autogenerative tools to imagine the Webbys content as part of the ongoing AI conversation.

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Using simple AI interpolation tools, we created “auras” that mixed the different emotional color states of creative people into ambient blotches. Those color auras were excited and subdued at the same time and became the basis for the brand identity that shows up across the nomination art, the website content, and the stage design. From there, we created a video that asked people how they felt about this moment in technology, and visualized it with AI autogenerative video. 

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The work became a kind of emotional time capsule that depicts a turning point in the development of AI and a crossroads in the world’s history.