Inside One Show Judging

The 2016 Interactive Jury saw a broad range of work ranging from clever utilities to emotionally resonant installations executed with low-fi technologies. And while there has been an exponential uptick in the number of pre-roll and online video series, overall there’s still a huge white space to keep pushing innovation in browser-based user experiences. Here are a few trends:

Category Convergence
Is it mobile or a website? Interactive video or online video? While we didn’t let the categories strictly define the work, we were constantly challenging ourselves to think about the interactive nature of each piece. I think there may be fewer interactive categories in future shows.

Online vs Interactive Video
Geico’s skippable pre-roll has impacted the entire online video category. However, clicking a skip button may or may not make a video interactive. Deeply immersive, user-directed videos didn’t seem to progress much this year, but VR will change interactive video in the next season.

Animation, Motion Graphics and Craft
Across the board, brands seem to be leaving this behind. Video content seems to be front and center this year, so the door is wide open for data visualization and immersive ideas. Music based visualizers were the exception to this trend.

Made for the Internet
We found ourselves inspired by work that felt like it was made for or of the Internet - not YouTube-clip, double-rainbow Internet, but fluent in internet culture and visual language. Work that felt both of the moment and universally appealing.

Non-Profits
As always, the non-profits, brought some of the biggest interactive ideas in the show. From gun control to international awareness of tourism challenges, the combination of technology and humanity moved us all.