GMANetwork.com Awards 2025

The first-ever GMANetwork.com Awards, a fan-voted yearender celebrating the Kapuso talent and shows that stood out in 2025, spanning categories from breakout stars to love teams to drama series of the year. As the inaugural edition, there was no previous version to build on or react to, so the visual direction had to be established from scratch.

On the brief, the only direction I got was for it to be classy and elegant. Since this is an inaugural awards, there were no moodboards, no reference decks, and no prior year to pull from. That's both freeing and a little dangerous, since it meant the tone had to come entirely from judgment rather than a brief to fall back on.

The route I chose for the design was for it to be slightly in ‘‘Art Deco” style to emanate high brow, rich, and glamorous style, while remaining current and trendy.

In the design stage, the wordmark came first. With no existing GMANetwork.com Awards identity to build from, the "AWARDS" lockup had to set the tone for everything downstream. Since we are going the “Art Deco“ route, the font I chose was an inline font; a classic Art Deco typography style.

The font used for the wordmark is Oskar Inline. The font is a big element in completing the art-deco-leaning treatment that read as premium and a little ceremonial. The wordmark also looks closer to a trophy engraving than a typical entertainment site graphic.

While Oskar Inline is the font used for the logo, it is not the font used for the copy/text in the materials since it’s too stylized. For this, I chose The Seasons font as a secondary font. It is a clean serif font, perfect for easy readability of texts clumped together, and also complements the wordmark keeping the whole design still on-brand.

Once that was locked, the rest of the system, the deep navy and gold palette, the spacing, the restraint, followed from it rather than the other way around.

The deep navy blue was chosen to exude royalty, while the gold complements and elevates further the blue color completing the rich and elegant Art Deco style.

With this many categories and nominees in play, the easy failure mode was visual noise: a grid of competing tiles and badges fighting for attention. I went the opposite direction and kept the system quiet, letting the wordmark and palette do the heavy lifting so the talent photography could stay the focus, and the awards felt cohesive rather than like a pile of separate contest pages bolted together.

One practical constraint shaped a lot of this. Most of the artist photos weren't studio shots I could art direct. They were pulled straight from the artists' own social media accounts, so quality, lighting, crop, and resolution varied wildly from one nominee to the next. Rather than hide that, I built it into the system: winner posts carry a small photo credit back to the source Instagram account, and formats like the Photo Posts and Partial Results use consistent bordered, circular, or squared crops to normalize a messy set of source images into something that reads as one clean grid regardless of what came in.

I also had to design across four distinct template types, all needing to feel like one system:

• Nominees: introducing the contenders per category

• Poll Main Images Banner: 16:9 banners for main image of each poll.

• Partial Results: circular nominee avatars paired with a live percentage bar chart, distinct from the final reveal

• Photo Posts: for social engagement pieces tied to the awards

• Winner Congratulatory Posters: social media posts announcing the winners in each category.

• Winner Plaques: the final, celebratory format for announced winners

Each had a different job, but none could look like it belonged to a different awards show. I allowed myself one deliberate break from the elegant tone: a "Last Day to Vote" treatment using a bold sticker-and-banner style to create urgency, since that message needed to interrupt rather than blend in.

Launched on GMANetwork.com to run the voting and nomination pages, then extended to broadcast when winners were revealed live during the Kapuso Countdown to 2026. That meant designing for two very different environments with the same visual language. The Winner Plaques in particular shifted register entirely, moving from social content into something closer to formal stationery: cream and gold, serif typography, and a full signatory block, since these were built to function as a keepsake as much as a graphic.

The identity also had to carry through the site's ad placements: leaderboard, super leaderboard, MREC, a mobile leaderboard, and a floating vote button, plus a mail blast announcing the voting window. That meant the same navy-and-gold system had to stay legible and on-brand at every size, down to a 320x50 mobile unit, without losing the elegance the larger formats could afford. A system has to hold up at browser scale, where people are scrolling and comparing, and at broadcast scale, where it's on screen for seconds and needs to read instantly. That constraint shaped how far I could push minimalism before it started costing legibility.

Note: Some images may appear slightly blurred due to their small original file size.

The network's first fan-driven digital awards program, launched successfully and carried through to a broadcast reveal, with the kind of reception that positions it to become an annual fixture rather than a one-off.