Lisa Wrake | Experiential ECD
TikTok LiveFest 2024 | Miami 2024
A winning pitch for the inaugural global creator awards show. Designed for the language, pace and behaviour of live streaming culture.
TikTok LIVE Fest brought together 500 award-winning creators in Miami for the platform’s first global TikTok LIVE awards ceremony, a large-scale live event designed not just to celebrate creators, but to define what TikTok LIVE could look and feel like as a cultural platform.
The challenge was to create an experience that worked simultaneously as a live event, a broadcast environment and a community-building moment for a highly networked, highly online audience.
Rather than designing for the room first, we designed for the platform first.
The idea
The central creative principle was simple:
Build an awards show from the behaviour of TikTok LIVE, not the conventions of traditional live entertainment.
That meant creating an environment shaped by the visual language, interaction patterns and audience expectations of live-streaming culture. The ambition wasn’t to replicate a broadcast show and force it into TikTok, but to create something that felt native to the platform while still delivering the scale and theatre of a global live moment.
The event needed to feel immediate, playful, participatory and deeply legible to creators and fans who already understood the codes of that world.
The experience
LiveFest blurred the line between physical and digital space, bringing creators together in person while opening the experience out to audiences watching and interacting live around the world.
The design was intentionally mobile-first, with every visual and spatial decision considered through the lens of portrait-format streaming and small-screen viewing. This shaped everything from the stage composition and screen layout to the activation design and live content moments.
At the centre of the event was a stage built from over 20 portrait-format screens, arranged to reflect the fragmented, fast-moving visual world of TikTok creators. Above it sat a large-scale inflatable installation inspired by TikTok LIVE “gifts”, an insider detail that gave the environment a layer of platform-native wit and recognisability.
Around the wider event, a series of live pods and creator-focused activations were designed to support real-time streaming, content creation and fan interaction throughout the experience.
My role
I led the creative team from pitch through to concept development, helping secure the project and shape the creative response for what was a significant global first for the platform.
A key part of the challenge was ensuring the experience didn’t just look impressive in the room, but actually worked for the way TikTok LIVE is consumed, streamed and shared. That meant leading a design approach that prioritised platform behaviour, creator utility and broadcast legibility alongside the usual demands of staging, audience energy and live event production.
This was a project where cultural understanding mattered as much as visual design, and where the success of the creative depended on making the event feel genuinely native to its audience rather than simply branded at them.
Outcome
TikTok LIVE Fest created a physical expression of a platform that is usually experienced through the screen, giving creators and audiences a shared global moment that felt both celebratory and strategically important.
More than an awards show, it helped establish a new live identity for TikTok LIVE, one rooted in creator culture, community and participation rather than traditional entertainment hierarchy.
It was a project that demonstrated how platform thinking, audience behaviour and experience design can come together to create something that feels both culturally sharp and operationally complex.