LZF’s Telling Tales brand campaign scoops a Red Dot Award this year

Cutting-edge lighting company LZF has scooped the prestigious Red Dot Award for Communication Design for its brilliant, inspiring, sensuous branding campaign, Telling Tales. Recognition has been given to this collection of illuminated stories — an exceptionally avant-garde, expressive endeavour whose execution is lively, eloquent and deliciously mysterious.

This highly original campaign, called Telling Tales, was directed by Mariví Calvo, co-founder of LZF, with the intention of differentiating its 2016 products from those of previous years. The campaign is based on three ideas: nocturnal images so the lights could be seen switched on, people rather than the spaces they inhabit taking centre-stage and the designs looking different to traditional ones and being artistic works in their own right. To this end, Telling Tales is told in three sections entitled Julie and Nelson, Lana and John and Alva and Silver. LZF’s lights shine brightly as an essential element in each of these stories. 

Valencia-based studio Masquespacio was also involved in the project. It came up with its main concepts and recreated the hyperreal photographic style of these stories set in the 1950s, which allude to the realist paintings of US artist Edward Hopper and Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie, Rear Window. Writer Grassa Toro provided the text accompanying each image. Written in a Surrealist tone, he describes these stories from a female perspective: a woman looking out of her window observes and imagines what is happening in the building opposite. Instead of accompanying each image with a direct explanation, Toro’s words allude to an imagined scenario. What distinguishes this campaign from others is its combination of extremely hyperrealist photographic detail with Toro’s story-telling.

This prize recognises LZF’s efforts to create original, effective branding projects and its ability to carry out high quality marketing campaigns. In 2013, LZF’s High Fidelity campaign won a Red Dot Award for Communication Design in the branding and sound categories. This included a successful collaboration with Los Angeles-based musician Rithma, a clear example of LZF’s willingness to experiment with different types of communication. As Sandro Tothill, a co-founder of the company says, ‘We are competing with communication and graphic design studios from all over the world. That we’re in that top 50 cadre of companies receiving the Red Dot Award in Communication Design is as much of an achievement for us as being given a Red Dot Design Award.’

An international recognition of the highest quality in design, the awards were founded in 1955 and are given by the Design Zentrum Nordrhein Westfalen in Essen, Germany. This year many pieces by Spanish companies and designers received prizes in the product design category.