The Canadian Cheese Awards
The Canadian Cheese Awards is a professional independent competition held to promote the best cheeses in Canada, create a recognized symbol of excellence for all Canadian cheese, and offer expert feedback to producers who submit entries. For my communication design class, I decided to rebrand this event to better suit the goals of the competition, and to better target their key demographics.
The goal of this project was to create an adaptable and unique rebrand that attracts cheese industry members and dedicated cheese lovers to the event. Further, provide a sense of professionalism and authenticity that the event needs.
The Canadian Cheese Awards is the most recognized cheese event in the country, attracting hundreds of entries per year. The brand treatment does not represent the event as a professional competition. In order to encourage growth in the event, the new brand targets cheese professionals who are able to submit their cheeses to be judged in the event, as well as the dedicated cheese enthusiasts who can attend the events taking place.
This new brand must also incorporate an adaptable system that can be used year after year with thematic changes annually. This year, the theme is "Krafted with Love," dedicated to the hard work and dedication that is found in the Canadian cheese making industry.
To complete this project, the workflow was a bit different depending on the medium being used. For digital interfaces, I used Sketch naturally, but everything else was designed in the Adobe Creative Suite.
Initially, it was a challenge overcoming the common cliches found when dealing with the subject of cheese: Everything was, for a lack of a better term, cheesy. This event needed to be taken seriously by the attendees, and the serious and professional undertones of the ceremony must be reflected within the brand itself.
I obviously learned a ton about cheese and how it's made through this project, but more importantly, I learned how important it was to identify the event's values before designing. When I first started working on the preliminary branding materials, I felt lost because I was designing the visuals for an generic, mainstream public when the true event is a more private and exclusive event for the industry. It was when I started to truly focus on the identity of the event itself that the visual language of the brand began to easily form.
Awesome design!