AV Festival
Branding / Copywriting / Event Art Direction
AV Festival is the UK's largest digital arts festival, and takes place in the cities of Newcastle Gateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. We were commissioned to re-brand AV Festival and to design all the promotional material for the 2006 event. Our brief was to make the event appeal to a broader audience than the "die-hard digital geeks".
The branding needed to be flexible so that it could be updated for each subsequent festival with the corresponding year and festival theme. We were conscious that as a brand it needed to be easily recognisable as well as being able to work with differing graphic concepts that future festivals may use. The AV part of the logo was developed from the two capitalised letters being close-fitting shapes that could be simplified further to form arrowheads. This created a logo that worked as a readable letterform, as well as resembling play/rewind and volume up/down icons. The rest of the logo houses a lot of information, so we introduced a secondary typeface to visually split it up. The overall style of the logo is intended to be friendly and not 'techy'.
The 2006 festival had the theme of LifeLike, which was inspired by the North East's very high concentration of bio-technology industries. The work selected and commissioned for the festival comments on topics such as cloning, DNA mapping, human/robot relationships and genetic engineering. These are all subjects that have been hotly debated in the media and the public is wary of them. Our concept jumped footfirst into the tabloid style journalism and scaremongering of such issues by creating provocative and intriguing statements that appear to be bewilderingly true, yet are of course ultimately ridiculous. Each statement refers to its host marketing material as if it is a living being, to heighten the sense of absurdity. Hence the posters were clones of real posters, the guidebook had been genetically modified to be 150% more useful, the adverts had been tested on animals. All of the statements were copywritten by Multistorey.
Our work for the festival included several billboards, press advertisements, banners and screen-based idents for the film viewings. A 52 page A5 festival guide used a timeline to simplify and organise the festival's 100+ events and screenings. This highly complex information design resulted in a simple at-a-glance guide to everything happening, at what point and in which of the three cities. The website that we art directed uses an linear adaptation of the timeline concept.