Cannes Lions
Between 2017 and 2020, the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity underwent a full-scale digital transformation. As Product Design Lead, I guided this evolution—redesigning the platform that powers the world’s most prestigious celebration of creativity.
The goal was clear: unify fragmented systems—delegate management, awards entry, judging, e-commerce, and event tools—into one cohesive digital ecosystem. The new Festival Platform became the single, intelligent access point for thousands of delegates, jurors, and organizers, combining elegance with operational precision.
The Challenge
The original Cannes Lions ecosystem consisted of several legacy systems—each built independently over years, with inconsistent design, duplicated logic, and manual workflows. During peak event periods, this fragmentation created friction for both users and staff.
The challenge wasn’t just aesthetic; it was structural and experiential. How could we design a single platform flexible enough to serve multiple audiences—delegates, agencies, judges, and partners—without losing clarity or speed?
Approach
We adopted a double diamond process to ensure iterative, evidence-based design decisions. The Festival Platform overhaul wasn’t just a visual redesign—it was a deep structural refinement of how users interacted with the system from end to end. Each major workflow was analyzed, mapped, and simplified based on friction analysis, behavioral data, and real-world testing during live festival operations.
By focusing on information hierarchy, predictable flow patterns, and clear feedback loops, the platform shifted from being a series of disjointed tools to a single, intuitive environment. The improvements weren’t just aesthetic—they directly improved conversion, satisfaction, and operational reliability during one of the most demanding annual events in the creative industry.
The Programme
The Festival Programme was one of the most information-dense parts of the platform from delegate perspective. Cannes Lions is a five-day event with hundreds of talks, workshops, and award ceremonies happening in parallel — across multiple stages and venues. Our goal was to design a system that helps users navigate abundance without feeling lost.
We approached this by merging three previously separate sections — Explore, Program, and Speakers — into a single, coherent discovery flow. From high-level browsing to moment-by-moment planning, users could now move seamlessly between inspiration and action. The design challenge was psychological as much as structural: you can’t be everywhere, but you can choose wisely. The timeline visualization turned this limitation into a sense of empowerment — giving participants the confidence to curate their own path through the festival rather than react to its chaos.
Agenda View: A personal timeline that adapts as users save or remove sessions, giving each delegate a clear visual plan of their festival week.
Timeline Layer: Displayed live overlaps between sessions, helping users make informed choices when time conflicts arose — a crucial improvement in an event where dozens of talks occur simultaneously.
Five-Day Overview: Offered a macro perspective across the full festival week, making it easier to spot thematic clusters, recurring speakers, or key ceremonies.
Save & Sync Feature: Delegates could bookmark events and instantly see them appear across their personal agenda on web and mobile, supporting on-site flexibility.
By integrating this system into the core Festival Platform, we shifted the experience from passive schedule browsing to active festival planning — enabling thousands of delegates to build personalized yet realistic agendas that aligned with their creative interests and time constraints.
Judging Dashboard
Judging used to require manual navigation between categories. The new task-oriented dashboard presented jurors with clear priorities, filtering, and inline scoring—all within one interface.
Eliminated redundant navigation steps.
Enabled jurors to complete reviews up to 25% faster while maintaining focus and consistency.
Impact
The new Festival Platform redefined how creativity and technology coexist at scale—supporting a global network of festivals and audiences. What began as a redesign for Cannes Lions evolved into a resilient digital foundation—powering creativity, commerce, and collaboration for years to come.
One unified Festival Platform powering multiple global events.
40% faster design-to-development cycle via scalable design system.
Improved user success rates across registration, submissions, and judging workflows.
Operational efficiency gains across teams through integrated data visibility.
Adopted framework extended to Dubai Lynx, Spikes Asia, Eurobest, and partially integrated by Money20/20.