August 18, 2026

From Obelisk to Pillar: How the Modern Freddie Award Was Designed

For most of the Freddie Awards' first quarter century, winning a Freddie meant carrying home a piece of faceted crystal. The obelisk. Tall, many-sided, heavy enough to double as a doorstop and reliably impressive under a ballroom spotlight, it was the trophy an entire generation of loyalty executives learned to recognize on a colleague's credenza.

It was also, as Randy Petersen liked to point out, roughly the same shape as everyone else's award.

The original faceted crystal obelisk Freddie Award beside a bottle for scale — The original obelisk Freddie, photographed in the Freddie Awards office. Etched with the category, the region and the year - and, as the scale suggests, not exactly carry-on friendly.

Why change a trophy that worked?

The obelisk had done its job. It said award in the universal language of engraved crystal. But by the early 2010s the Freddies were changing around it. Voting had gone global, the ballot had gone multilingual, and the ceremony had grown from an industry gathering into a night that programs built campaigns around. The award on stage needed to look like it belonged to that moment rather than to 1988.

Randy's brief was short and, characteristically, a little stubborn: he did not want more facets, more engraving or more ornament. He wanted less. A minimalist form that read as status from across a room and needed no explanation up close. Something quiet enough to sit on a desk for twenty years and still look deliberate.

Enter Society Awards

The Freddies took the brief to Society Awards, the New York studio whose work travelers already knew even if they had never heard the name. Society Awards designs and produces the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the MTV Video Music Award, the American Music Award, the Academy of Country Music Award, the Billboard Music Award, the Dancing with the Stars trophy and the trophy handed out on The Voice. Placing a travel loyalty award in that company was itself part of the point.

What came back, in a study dated February 2013, was a set of concepts that took the brief in every plausible direction at once - and a few implausible ones.

The concepts that didn't win

Several directions leaned literal. A polished aircraft floating on a slim post. A crystal wedge with a jet etched into the glass. These were handsome, and they were exactly the sort of thing a travel award is expected to be.

Society Awards concept: a polished silver aircraft mounted on a slim post above a black cylindrical base — Concept: the literal reading - a sculpted aircraft in flight above a black cylinder base.

Society Awards concept: a crystal wedge with an aircraft silhouette forming its upper edge — Concept: a crystal wedge whose upper edge resolves into an aircraft profile.

Society Awards concept: a tall faceted crystal fan rising from a round black base — Concept: an evolved crystal form - closer to the obelisk lineage, with a swept fan face.

Others went fully abstract: sails, wings, flames, ribbons. Motion rendered in metal.

Society Awards concept: a curved metallic sail form on a round black base — Concept: the sail - lift expressed as a single curved plane.

Society Awards concept: a silver ribbon folded into a wing-like burst on a round black base — Concept: a folded ribbon, the most sculptural of the studies.

Society Awards concept: stacked silver wing forms rising from a slender stem — Concept: stacked wings, reaching for the vertical without a solid mass.

Society Awards concept: two crossed silver wing shapes on a slender stem above a black cylinder — Concept: crossed wings - the closest the abstract studies came to a bird in flight.

Society Awards concept: two tall curved metallic blades on a rectangular black base — Concept: paired blades on a rectangular plinth.

Society Awards concept: a twisting silver flame form rising from a round black base — Concept: the twist - a single surface rotating through its own height.

Society Awards concept: a single tapered silver leaf form rising from a round black base — Concept: the leaf, and the first study to suggest that one uninterrupted vertical might be enough.

Society Awards concept: a tall slender tapered column with a softly angled top — Concept: paring the vertical back until almost nothing decorative remains.

The one that became the Freddie

The direction that survived was the least decorated of the set. A tapered column - a pillar - rising cleanly from a black base, with the aircraft not bolted on top but etched faintly inside the glass, visible only when the light and the angle agree. Everything Randy had asked for: status, simplicity, and no ornament competing with the name of the program engraved on it.

Society Awards concept: the tapered pillar with an aircraft etched inside the glass, shown beside a flat detail of the etching — The winning direction: a tapered pillar on a black base, with the aircraft etched inside the glass rather than applied to it.

Produced in optical crystal, the pillar debuted at the Freddie Awards in 2013 and has been the trophy ever since. It photographs well in a winner's hands, it stacks sensibly in a shipping crate, and - the practical test of any award - it survives being carried through an airport by someone who has just spent an evening celebrating.

More than a decade on, the pillar has done what the obelisk did for the twenty-five years before it: become the thing you recognize instantly in a program's lobby. The difference is that nobody mistakes it for anyone else's award.

Concept artwork courtesy of Society Awards, from the 2013 Freddie Awards design study.