PVS X Creative Hero 2023

Welcome back to the PVS blog!

 

This week we want to tell you about the Creative Hero project, a very interesting contest in which we participated with enthusiasm and curiosity.

 

Promoted by the Istituto Salesiano San Marco in Mestre, Creative Hero is a challenge involving young students from high schools across Italy. The objective? To create graphic projects for the products of 3 companies, each different in terms of type, values, and target audience.

 

 

The 2023 edition saw PVS as one of the 3 briefers: we reviewed many projects from all over Italy and were able to see the flair and creativity of numerous young students!

 

 

We’ll tell you more through a conversation with Matteo Dittadi, Graphics & Design teacher at the Istituto Salesiano San Marco and head of the Design department at Smartmix, a web agency specialized in communication, web, and social media.

 

 

 

Question: Matteo, tell us: what is Creative Hero?

Matteo: Creative Hero is Italy’s largest creative challenge open to students of graphics and communication. This year we recorded a total of 1732 participants, divided into 661 teams from 35 schools distributed throughout Italy – mainly from Friuli, Trentino, Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont, Emilia Romagna, Lazio, Calabria, and Sicily. I’m proud to announce that this has been the edition with the highest school participation so far: we registered 10 more schools and about 300 more students compared to the 2022 edition. Our forecasts for next year are excellent: we expect to exceed 2000 participating students and further expand the panel of schools joining the project. Creative Hero is a contest that sits halfway between a creative competition and a request with technical and technological elements supporting creativity. We ask the students to create a graphic project for three briefers, companies that need a logo and a communication campaign for their product/service. Thanks to the collaboration with Epson, we rewarded projects that were not only beautiful and graphically valid but also printable and “executable” in terms of design, ready to be shown to everyone.

 

 

 

Q: And this year, we at PVS were also among the briefers.
M: Exactly. PVS was among the briefers along with two other business realities, La Giardiniera di Morgan, a preserves factory in Malo (Vi), and Bios Line, a company active in the beauty sector based in Padua. PVS had the opportunity to review 42 projects, selected by the schools of origin of the groups chosen to represent their respective institutes at a national level. From these 42, PVS selected the 3 projects deemed most interesting to develop and that had responded to the initial request. The three finalist teams then participated in a final bootcamp, a weekend during which all the finalist teams met in Mestre and had the opportunity to develop the projects, revising them with the clients themselves and with dedicated tutors.

 

 

 

Q: Who won the final prize for PVS?
M: Of the three projects that reached the final (Command-G, La Testata, and Fiori di Loto) for PVS, we appreciated very different elements from each. One was very “disruptive” and was immediately noticed for its communicative discontinuity compared to PVS’s tone of voice. The second struck us for the innovative elements inserted into the current brand graphics; the third had very interesting potential, elements that stood out from the rest, definitely worth paying attention to. The winning group was La Testata, which brought innovation while maintaining the current elements of the coordinated image.
The three winning teams of the challenges won Amazon vouchers worth €500, while all finalists received a welcome kit and a personalized CH23 sweatshirt.

 

 

 

Q: What do you say about the level of emotional involvement of the students in this challenge? Do you think someone might have decided, after this experience, to pursue a career as a graphic designer in the future?
M: The young people showed immediate engagement in the project, happy and very involved in the development, brainstorming, and production work.
Even the finalists who arrived at the bootcamp worked excellently, despite the pressure of limited time (barely two days) to revise the project, make changes after meetings with tutors, and prepare a presentation. The young people worked exactly as if they were employees of a creative agency, with all the deadlines and variables that can occur in a serious and formal work context. This is one of the characteristics that makes me most proud of the Creative Hero contest: students literally learn by doing, they are immersed – even if for a few days – in the real dynamics of the working world, they get a first taste of the know-how needed to build their future career.

 

 

 

Thanks to the entire Creative Hero team for involving us in this interesting and stimulating project!

 

Want to know more about what you’ve read in this article? Write to us, contact PVS.