AV Festival
Event Art Direction / Copywriting / Feb 08

AV Festival is the UK's largest digital arts festival, and takes place in the cities of Newcastle/Gateshead, Middlesborough and Sunderland. This was the second such event, the first having taken place in 2006 when we initially branded the festival and became its ongoing art directors.

AV Festival 08 was given the theme Broadcast and all artists and contributors were asked to respond to this theme. Broadcast was chosen to reflect some very current issues Ñ this year sees the start of the national switch to digital television, plus the huge phenomenon of user-generated broadcasting through sites such as youtube etc.

Our role as festival art directors involves creating a visual identity that conveys the theme whilst staying within the AV Festival brand. 2006's original logo was intended to evolve slightly with each festival, so this time we used a new colour palette and a revised secondary font throughout. To introduce the theme Broadcast, we experimented with monotone patterns that describe radiowaves and transmissive signals. We used these to create decorative devices and patterns that would form the framework to more straightforward typographic slogans and statements. The statements discuss the potential of the visitors as being both the transmitter and the receiver of broadcasts, and used phrases associated with telecommunications. As with the first festival materials, we based each statement on its host marketing material, so the teaser flyer became the test transmission, the festival guide states 'This is the transmission. Are you receiving?', another flyer is giving out signals and a banner asks 'Are you reading me?' etc. Multistorey were responsible for the copywriting and design of all items.

Our work for the festival included several billboards, press advertisements, banners and screen-based idents for the film viewings. A 74 page A5 festival guide used a timeline to simplify and organise the festival's 150+ events and screenings. This highly complex information design resulted in a simple at-a-glance guide to everything that was happening, at what point and in which of the three cities.