Mindfulness, wellness, health, human connection, growth, seeking refuge in the natural world–amid the challenges of contemporary culture, these concepts rose to the surface with new meaning. And, as we considered our focus for the 2025 PRINT Awards, that meaning took root.
Biophilia-Inspired Branding for This Year’s Awards
When PRINT presented biophilia as the central theme to the designers at The Collected Works, the team dug right in to explore and deliver a brand for the 2025 PRINT Awards. The biophilic brand system highlights our innate human connection to the natural world, evoking a parallel theme of the cultivation of creativity.
Nature certainly takes center stage with this year’s brand identity. Utilizing a combination of Pangram Pangram Foundry’s luxurious Playground typeface along with workhorse Instrument Sans, the primary logo balances professionalism with organic appeal. The addition of a second typeface, Pangram Pangram’s Pangaia provides an opportunity for us to carry that charm into other promotional formats.
Beyond the brand mark for the PRINT Awards, the talented team at TCW worked on a complete array of brand assets, including a short film to announce the regular registration period of the competition. Below, Justin Colt, partner & creative director, and Christian Townsend, senior design & 3D artist, share the full brand case study.
Concept Overview
Justin Colt: Here at TCW, we were excited to take on the design and short call-for-entries film for the 2025 Print Awards. After an initial chat with the PRINT team, we were all inspired by the concept of biophilia—the connection between nature and humans. It felt like a cool metaphor—the idea of creativity and exploration represented through growing, evolving plant structures interacting with more “solid” elements, like rocks and typography. Kind of like creativity and exploration weaving their way around structure and grids. You know, something like that?
As with most of our studio projects, we kicked things off with a research and development phase. What should this environment feel like? How were we going to create and animate our plant life? We also liked the idea of keeping the whole video contained to just one scene—a small rock alcove where plants could grow, creep, and bloom. From there, we planned to pan through different moments and vignettes to highlight how the plants interacted with the rocks and typography. Since the entire growth process was generative and procedural, we got to take on more of an observer role—capturing where the plants naturally wanted to grow and bloom.
Process & Key Visual Elements
Christian Townsend: Conceptually, we loved the idea of creating simulations that run on their own—producing unexpected behavior and interesting emergent forms, which we could then explore and capture with the camera. Visually, however, we always want to ensure that the final product feels intentional and directed—not necessarily the easiest feat when working with procedural simulations.
Our process for this film involved a continuous back-and-forth—workshopping individual systems separately, then merging them back into the larger scene to see how they interacted with the rest of the world. As we built and layered in more and more systems, the world really started to come alive. Houdini, our 3D tool of choice for projects like this, was absolutely integral to the workflow. It allowed us to approach these films in an extremely modular way—building recipes for effects used throughout the project, running simulations on top of other simulations—really anything we could imagine. Houdini gave us the tools to attempt it.
Sculptural Rocks
We start with stacked geometric shapes, some of which add to the form, while others cut away from it. We then process these geometric sculptures into organic chiseled-looking forms. These sculptural rocks are the foundation on which every other piece grows.
Generative Flowers
Petals are automatically generated to fit along hand-drawn curves, then animated with bone deformations and run through a cloth simulation at the end to remove any intersections and add flowy movement. These are really fun to play with and create new alien forms of flowers.
Ivy Growth
Simulated particles explore the surfaces and trigger the growth of flowers and leaves along their paths. You can also hand-draw specific curves to convert them into vines.
Some of our typographic exploration.
Refinements
Christian Townsend: As we added new layers of detail and continued building up the scene, we also refined and pushed the existing elements into a more harmonious state—integrating them with the typographic system that was developing alongside the film. We began introducing more vibrant and ethereal colors and incorporated moments where the 2D and 3D elements of the design system could interact with each other. We brought in our friends at Roju Sound to complement these visuals with some amazing sound design. This was also the stage where we locked in camera angles, pacing, and cuts—allowing all the individual ingredients to finally come together into a cohesive package.
Justin Colt: From a sound perspective, we wanted this piece to feel partially grounded in reality while also carrying an otherworldly quality. For instance, what does it sound like when a flower—symbolizing design and creativity—blooms? Overall it was also important for us to strike a balance, blending deeper undertones with lighter, more sparkling audio moments.
Vibrant stone materials
Additional ground cover flora & moss
The first fully rendered flower bloom exploration
A collection of flower renders
The Finale
Justin Colt: In the end, we’re really excited about how everything came together. Our rock alcove is overtaken by generative vines, blooming and flowering. By allowing the procedural plants to essentially “grow themselves,” we became observers of the process, dropping cameras in to capture naturally occurring moments. It’s a fun way to approach these kinds of short films.
At just over 60 seconds, it feels like a nice duration—telling a quick story and (hopefully) leaving people wanting a bit more.
Christian Townsend: We really appreciate PRINT’s openness to a more exploratory way of working through the production of this film. It was the perfect brief for the studio to be able to really nerd out and deep dive into new and exciting processes, and we think the end product turned out so much better for it.
We’re very thankful to PRINT for trusting us with this one.
A collection of stills from the final film.
And the final film in all its glory!
For more information about the 2025 PRINT Awards, the 28 categories for your work, and to find out how to enter the competition this year, visit the PRINT Awards site and be sure to submit your work by January 21 for the best rates of the season!
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