Emirates was the main sponsor of SIGNAL in 2019 — Prague’s international festival of light and digital art, held across multiple locations in the city’s historic centre.
SIGNAL’s position was clear: no conventional advertising between the artworks. Any brand presence had to be able to stand alongside the festival’s installations as something worth experiencing in its own right.
I developed the concept and creative brief for the Emirates commission. The approach: give each of Emirates’ destination networks — East Asia, Asia-Pacific, Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Middle East — its own visual character. Distinctive cultural motifs and interpretations of national symbols for each region, animated into a continuous journey rather than a sequence of hard cuts.
The animation opens with an Emirates aircraft taking off — the unmistakable silhouette, the recognisable livery — and then travels through destination world after destination world, each one its own visual moment.
The brief went to illo, an Italian motion design studio and regular SIGNAL collaborator, who executed it with character-led animation: playful, culturally specific, visually rich. Typographic destination messaging and a CTA were initially refused by the festival as too commercial — we made the case and they approved it. After the initial concept, my role was art direction and brand review throughout illo’s production: keeping the output true to the Emirates visual language while giving illo the creative latitude the festival context required.
