This project covers the visual identity for CNET's Best of CES, the award recognizing standout innovations at the world's largest tech show. The work includes a reusable badge system for honorees, a refreshed page template that gives winners prominent placement, and the physical trophy itself — creating a cohesive identity from digital recognition to tangible award.
CES is the world’s most powerful technology event, an annual gathering in Las Vegas that has set the stage for the industry’s biggest debuts since 1967. From the home VCR to the CD player to OLED TVs and autonomous vehicles, it’s where the future gets its first public introduction. Today the show draws over 148,000 attendees and 4,100+ exhibitors, making it the only event that covers the full breadth of consumer technology under one roof.
For CES 2026, CNET Group, the suite of publishers behind CNET, PCMag, Mashable, ZDNET, and Lifehacker, served as the official awards partner for the Consumer Technology Association’s Best of CES™ program. More than 40 expert journalists spent six and a half hours on the show floor evaluating thousands of innovations, ultimately selecting 23 winners across categories that had doubled in scope from the prior year.
CNET Group produced and hosted the live ceremony on the CTA Stage at the Las Vegas Convention Center, with winners simultaneously published to CNET.com. The program demanded a visual identity system that could hold up across every surface it touched: digital badges on the page, a physical trophy on the stage, and broadcast graphics in front of a global audience.
The core challenge was designing a badge system that merged CES’s 2026 color palette with CNET Group’s existing badge conventions, established clear visual hierarchy between Finalist and Winner tiers, and extended from a digital badge into physical award objects for the show itself. Each piece had to read as part of the same family, whether sitting on a product listing, displayed in editorial, or handed to a winner on stage.
Before designing anything new, I audited badge conventions across CNET Group properties to understand what made each feel native to its brand. CES 2026 brought its own distinct palette differing from anything already in the system. The challenge was merging the two without losing either.
Early explorations applied the colors with similar visual weight, using a gradient and dotted dividers between tiers. Finalist and Winner looked almost identical. The only differentiator was the color variations and the label text, which wasn’t enough for a badge meant to communicate recognition at a glance.
The solution was color inversion. Winner badges lead with purple, Finalist badges lead with green. The tier reads before the label does. I also produced two Winner variants: one with the CNET Group logo for onsite editorial use, one without for company and offsite use.
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No template existed for a CES awards hub, so I started with what was already working. The gift guide format had a solid structural foundation: jump link navigation, a product card grid, and an editorial byline block. I carried those forward and shifted the visual language from commerce to editorial authority. The hero became a full-bleed purple block with the Best of CES badge and all five CNET Group masthead logos. Category winners display in a card grid, and the overall winner gets a wider featured card treatment that signals it outranks the rest.
The badge system needed to extend beyond the CNET page and into the real world. For the show floor, finalists received a 2"x8" ribbon and winners received an acrylic trophy produced through Society Awards, both using the same color treatment as their digital counterparts so the system read consistently across every touchpoint. The trophy carried the Best of CES mark and year, giving winners something tangible to display and photograph. Beyond the show, the offsite Winner badge variant gave companies a clean, logo-free version to use in their own press materials and marketing, extending the award’s reach well past the ceremony itself.
