How Annex became the creative and digital partner behind one of the Hudson Valley’s most exciting nonprofits, redesigning their website and creating the identity, campaign and trophy for THE HUDSYS Community Awards. A look at what it takes to design for mission-driven, community-led organizations.
HUDSY is a 501(c)(3) film production company on a mission to educate and connect communities through the power of visual storytelling. From a studio in Kingston, its team makes documentaries that uplift real, everyday people across the Hudson Valley: stories that foster understanding and amplify voices the mainstream tends to overlook.
Around that core, HUDSY runs a paid Filmmaker Apprenticeship, rents its studio to local creatives, takes on production work up and down the river, and gathers the community at live events. It needed a brand design system and digital presence that could support that mission and activities.
We create documentaries that uplift real everyday people — stories that foster connection, that you won’t find in mainstream media.
They brought Annex in for two things at once:
A cinematic, dark-mode site uniting films, programs, production services, events, and donor journeys under one cohesive system.
The visual identity for the Community Awards Show, the golden HUDSYS letterforms and event look, carried across every touchpoint.
A custom-made award trophy set designed from The HUDSYS letterforms and prepared as production-ready files, fabricated in collaboration with local students..
A full system across social, printed collateral, and open-graph formats, plus animated reels to reveal the winners for each award category.
HUDSY came to us with a brand they already loved, a television set drawn as a speech bubble. It says “broadcast” and “community” in one mark, and works from a favicon to a festival banner. Our job was to extend it into a cinematic website, and into a standout identity for THE HUDSYS Community Awards.
We designed and built a dark-mode home for everything HUDSY does. Creating an experience where content leads, users can browse films, programs, production and events in an easy-to-use navigation and layout. Set in a mono headline voice with the brand’s electric yellow used like a highlighter.
As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit film production company, our mission is to educate and connect communities through the power of visual storytelling.
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A night that turns a year of community storytelling into a celebration. We created the full identity for THE HUDSYS — the logo and golden letterforms, the campaign that filled the room, and the trophy placed in winners’ hands.
The award itself had to embody the mission: we designed the trophies around the HUDSY logo, creating a 3D version of the recognizable TV bug rising from a base.
It was developed in collaboration with students at BOCES — working alongside the regional Board of Cooperative Educational Services program to refine the form and prototype the build. From there we prepared production-ready source files for a run of six (two golden-topped) in brass and acrylic, standing 8–10 inches tall.
Community organizations are asked to do the most with the least, to look credible to funders, welcoming to neighbors, and professional to partners, often without an in-house creative team. That’s exactly the gap Annex is built to fill: an always-on creative partner that scales up for a launch or an awards night, and stays steady the rest of the year.
HUDSY is the kind of partner we want more of, organizations whose impact is real and whose stories deserve to be told well. We bring the brand systems, websites, and campaigns; they keep changing the Hudson Valley.
Annex just got us from the start. Every time we saw a new design, it felt like they’d been part of HUDSY for years and really understood the mission. Annex gave us the kind of creative that made people take us seriously. The site, the HUDSYS identity, the trophy… none of that would have landed the way it did without that kind of partnership. This is what nonprofits like HUDSY dream of!
We partner with nonprofits and community-driven organizations to build brands, websites and campaigns that help make a difference.
