Condé Nast - Glamour UK — awards shows 2022-2024
Women of the Year
The Glamour Women of the Year Awards is one of the UK's most high-profile cultural celebrations — an annual event published by Condé Nast that honours trailblazing women across entertainment, activism, sport, business, and public life. Past honourees have included Nicole Kidman, Naomi Campbell, Victoria Beckham, Millie Bobby Brown, and America Ferrera.
Observatory held a sustained creative partnership with Glamour and Condé Nast across several consecutive editions of the event, developing not just the audio-visual content for the night itself but contributing to the wider visual language and experiential identity of the awards as a whole.
Our work spanned the full spectrum — live ceremony content, opening sequences, individual award reveal animations, an immersive installation at Outernet London, Instagram AR filters designed for post-event social share, and brand-adjacent visual development in close collaboration with Condé Nast's internal creative directors.
THE BRIEF
Connect every space. Make it theatre. Make it a world.
Condé Nast commissioned Observatory to design and produce the complete creative output for the Glamour Women of the Year Awards — one of the UK's most high-profile cultural events, honouring outstanding women across entertainment, activism, sport, business and public life.
The brief was expansive: connect all the different spaces of the Outernet venue into a fully immersive experience inside and out. Define an overarching theme that unites the LED tunnel, the ceremony space and the street-facing screens. Bring an element of theatre to the experience. Make it feel like a journey.
The thematic territory was powerful — women reshaping the world: empowerment, sustainability, inclusivity, sexuality, champion diversity. Working directly alongside Condé Nast's internal creative directors, Observatory developed both the conceptual framework and a complete 3D visual toolkit, shared across all production teams to ensure a continuous look and feel across every surface of the event.
THE SPACES
Three en vironments. One unbroken world.
The Outernet venue presented three distinct LED environments — each with its own format, scale, and audience relationship. Observatory designed content across all three so that no matter where guests were in the building, or watching from the street outside, they were inside the same visual story.
now arcade
Now Trending
The giant LED tunnel — a continuous 10–15 minute experiential journey transporting guests from street level into the awards world. The narrative arc moved from Intrigue and Mesmerise, through Build Up and Intensify, to a Utopian Crescendo and final passage Through the Doorway. Two to three distinct landscape states, with morphing transitions representing women reshaping the world.
Now Building
The four-storey street-facing LED exterior — extending the event's presence across London's West End and reaching thousands of passers-by beyond the guest list. Outer screen content formatted for maximum public impact, reinforcing the brand identity of the event at city scale on the streets of WC2H.
The subterranean live-stream ceremony space — the awards stage itself. Observatory produced the complete ceremony visual package: the event opening, 8–10 individual award reveal animations per show, sponsor segments, and all stage transitions. Each honouree's reveal was individually art directed to feel cinematic and emotionally specific, never templated.
"Can we connect the different spaces to give a fully immersive experience inside and out... Can we bring an element of theatre to the experience?"
Original brief — Condé Nast / Glamour UK Creative Direction
deliverables
From the tunnel to the timeline. Every surface covered.
The Outernet venue presented three distinct LED environments — each with its own format, scale, and audience relationship. Observatory designed content across all three so that no matter where guests were in the building, or watching from the street outside, they were inside the same visual story.
Immersive Arcade Experience
Award Show Content
A 15 m journey through the Now Arcade LED tunnel, structured across multiple landscape states over 3 minutes. Utopian soft-flowing landscapes with nebulaic cloudscapes and charged inner-core sequences. The Samsung Galaxy product integrated as a portal and doorway device between phases.
Complete production of the live ceremony visual package — event opening sequence, 8–10 individual award reveal animations per show, idents, stings, sponsor segments, and stage transitions. Each honouree reveal individually art directed: cinematic, personal, and emotionally specific rather than templated.
Visual Toolkit
Instagram AR Filters
A master library of shared 3D assets — iridescent ribbon sculptures, pearl geometries, floating glass forms, X-particle head studies — supplied as Quicktime files for integration across all production teams. A shared visual DNA ensuring continuity from the tunnel to the stage to the street.
Two filter directions developed for British Glamour's Instagram account via Meta Spark Studio: a Flower Bloom animation filter and a glitch-floral silhouette adaptation. Published to millions of followers, the filters extended the event's visual identity into social and made the night participatory for audiences far beyond the venue.
CREATIVE QR Codes
Brand Identity Contribution
Fully scannable QR codes rendered as animated iridescent 3D sculptures in the same visual language as the wider event. Displayed across event screens and social channels, they blended functional utility with the same aesthetic craft applied throughout the production — a small detail that encapsulated the whole project.
Working directly with Condé Nast's internal creative directors across multiple editions, Observatory's visual systems fed into the wider event identity — the iridescent palette, glitch-floral motif, and sculptural 3D language all contributing to the official WOTY brand, from invitation design to event collateral.
Creative Approach
A utopian vision. Built one landscape at a time.
The concept of "reshaping the world" opened up a rich creative territory — an aspirational, imaginative place not yet experienced, where sustainability, inclusivity and equal identity flourish. Observatory leaned into abstraction to let the imagination wander. The arcade became a travelator. The main room became the transformation itself.
A Journey, Not a Backdrop
Two Visual Registers
The core creative insight was to treat the entire venue as a single narrative arc. The Arcade became a travelator — an aspirational journey towards a utopian vision of the future. By the time guests reached the awards space, the transformation was complete. The event began the moment they stepped into the tunnel.
Room 01's soft utopian landscapes — pastel dreamscapes, pearl geometries, iridescent ribbons, floating florals — gave way to Room 02's charged power-source aesthetic: darker, stronger, unforgiving. The contrast created emotional range and the sense of a world both beautiful and fierce, entirely right for an event celebrating women who take no prisoners.
One Shared Visual DNA
Social; Part of the Experience
With multiple production teams working across the event, Observatory created a master toolkit of 3D assets — iridescent sculpted forms, X-particle portraits, glitch florals, animated geometries — all as layerable Quicktime files. Every team drew from the same visual DNA, giving continuity across the tunnel, the stage, the street, and social media.
The AR filter programme was a core component of the experience strategy, not an afterthought. Built in the same iridescent floral visual language as the main event and distributed through British Glamour's Instagram account, the filters extended the awards night into millions of personal feeds — making it participatory for audiences who were never in the room.
