This new award show packages the year’s best (and otherwise) in music, movies, TV and personalities and puts it all into a neat two-hour time-capsule. It is one of a couple new programming concepts that are created to underline VH1’s authority in all things pop culture.

When we were asked to design the show’s packaging and award, we took the metaphor of the time capsule and translated it into a story about a little space ship-meets-Mini Cooper that crashes on a planet in the future. Using the content of this time capsule, the population of that planet mounts a “Big in 2002” expo city.

The award, by celebrities during the show referred to as a submarine or a space ship, shows the time capsule on its crash site. It was designed by Jonathan Notaro.

For the show package, we designed the expo city and its exhibitions using heavy 3D-modelling that is dressed up with lots of layers of photography, typography and illustration. Our main source of inspiration was 20th century utopian architecture, especially by the British collective Archigram. We were very interested in the art of presenting architectural concepts in forms of analog collages, before the advent of the Form Z software.

The core pieces of any awards show are the category packages. VH1 came to us with irreverent and cryptic category names like “Can’t get you outta my head” for the award for the most catchy song of 2002. We spent two weeks writing scenarios that sometimes explained the concept of the category, and in other instances added another layer of referentiality to the name.

The category packages show exhibition pieces that refer to and parody modes of exhibiting art; from painting to installations, from video art to performance art. “Can’t get you outta my head”, for example, shows a space with a bust of a woman, a projection of musical scores on the wall and a little museum plaque displaying the name of the category. As we move around the bust, the face slides up and reveals an Apple iPod inside of the head. The iPod slides out and winks at us.

The project was an extraordinary opportunity to design a new and futuristic looking world that is still filled with timely references to the year 2002. The highly irreverent nature of the show allowed our imagination to go wild, thanks also to the liberties our client granted us.

For the show’s typography we used the typeface Precrime, designed by Jens Gehlhaar for the eponymous crime prevention organization in the 2002 Spielberg movie “Minority Report”. Just like the architecture and the graphic design, it perfectly addresses the contradictory ideas of futurism and timeliness.