RT’s creative lab has won its first Red Dot, with an augmented reality (AR) album about the Romanov family. The international design prize is over 50 years-old and is among of the most prestigious in the creative community.

This year, 24 international experts in the area of product design and communications evaluated 8,697 entries and chose #Romanovs100 as one of the winners of the Red Dot Brands & Communication design accolade. Only 8.9 percent of the brands and works entered in the competition managed to get through the strict judging.

#Romanovs100 is a multi-platform digital story about Russia’s last reigning royal family, told through thousands of their private photographs. The social media narrative was active through summer 2018, coming to a conclusion on the centenary of the night the family was murdered by the Bolsheviks.

In early 2019 the team released the #Romanovs100 augmented reality album, which boasted about 60 activation possibilities. This extended reality book breaks the ‘fourth wall’ of storytelling, providing for side-narratives, archive video, 3D visualizations and more.

The project is a 66th Cannes Lions finalist in the Media, Use of Branded Content Created for Digital/Social category, and has won 12 other prestigious awards, but this is a first win for the book. Earlier, the #Romanovs100 AR album was nominated for a D&AD in Book Design.

The album will now be presented in the Red Dot Design Museum at the historic Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex in Essen, Germany. There are three Red Dot design museums in the World: in Essen, Singapore and Taipei.

With thousands of entries yearly from design professionals, companies and organizations from over 70 countries, the Red Dot Award is one of the world’s most prodigious design competitions, and the most renowned. Red Dot publishes yearbooks and specialist publications through the Red Dot Edition publishing company and combines different online portals, several museums as well as global exhibitions under its umbrella brand.

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