Digital Legacy
2004 The Concentra Award for Digital Video Journalism Website
The Concentra Award was created at a pivotal moment in the evolution of journalism. A joint initiative between Concentra Media—one of Belgium’s oldest and largest media groups—and Michael Rosenblum, pioneer of video journalism, the award set out to legitimize and advance a new editorial model: journalists who filmed, edited, and authored their own stories. Established in 2004, it quickly became the world’s leading annual prize for video journalism, recognizing both depth of content and mastery of production, with a particular focus on speed, authorship, and independence.
Client
Concentra (BE)
Methodo Design (PT)
Services
UI/UX (Information Design)
Front-end Design
Content Creation
My involvement began at the very start of the award. Concentra Media asked me to design and build the digital platform that would represent the prize internationally. What initially seemed like a complication—having just relocated from Belgium to Portugal—became an advantage.
The project evolved as a genuinely European collaboration, coordinated across borders, cultures, and disciplines at a time when remote digital production was far from standard practice.
Beyond design, my role involved orchestrating a distributed team: aligning Portuguese freelance developers with the Concentra Award team in Brussels, while ensuring that the platform reflected the ambition and credibility of the initiative. The website was not conceived as a promotional layer, but as a digital extension of the award’s mission—supporting submissions, visibility, and the growing identity of video journalism as a serious, independent discipline.
Visually, the approach was deliberately minimal and distinctly digital. Full-screen imagery, layered content, and modular interfaces were explored to give moving image and narrative priority—within the technical constraints of the time. Bandwidth limitations, browser inconsistencies, and early web standards imposed clear boundaries, but they also forced discipline: clarity of structure, simplicity of interaction, and focus on content over effects.
