The Harpers

The brief:

The Harpers is an internal awards ceremony for HarperCollins Publishers, which celebrates exceptional achievements and creativity, and showcases outstanding work. For two years running, we were asked to promote the awards with printed promotion posters, a website that allowed HC staff to nominate candidates, and design and animate the motions graphics for the event.

The project:

For the 2010 ceremony, the theme was the 1980s, so we researched a variety of retro memorabilia – from Tron Posters to Smash Hits magazines – to find key icons that we felt summed up the era, such as those classic neon lips, ghetto blasters and cassette tapes.



We mixed these with satisfying slabs of angular shapes and brash colours, deliberately embracing both the cyber-style tackiness of the era and the tongue-in-cheek tone of the event itself. The website was seamlessly integrated with the Wufoo API, a fast, secure third party online form builder. This allowed the HC staff to nominate candidates through a fully-branded web experience, while granting HarperCollins managers easy access to run real-time reports on the event's progress.

To present the various categories, we had the rather awesome task of sifting through hours of our favourite cheesy 80s movies to create power ballad-fuelled montages that led into each nomination.


The Harper Awards 2011 saw a theme that reflected a year’s worth of great HarperCollins book covers. We trawled through hundreds of jackets and selected key celebrities, politicians, animals, insects and even claymation stars to feature in the campaign. 

Once again, this began as a poster campaign accompanied by the voting website. We then created 11 indents that joyfully referenced Monty Python style animation as we cast our book heroes in bizarre – and often unnecessarily violent – scenes. 

This was most definitely the project that made us laugh the most this year.

Testimonial:

'Working with One Darnley Road has been an unalloyed joy. Their perfect mix of insight, creative thinking and faultless execution means I have no hesitation in recommending them as creative partners. The projects they have worked on with me have been some of my favourites of the last couple of years.'



Benedict North, 
Creative Director HarperCollins UK