Mountains to Sea is a literary festival based in the scenic seaside town of Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin. Taking literary festivals to another level, Mountains to Sea explores themes of hospitality, home and democracy and challenges audiences, young and old, to connect and shape the world around them. Piquant was commissioned to update the festival brand identity and logo design, to design the festival brochure and to create a range of print and social assets.
What we did:
- Brand Development
- Logo Design
- Print Design
- Photography Production
- Content Creation
- Social Media Graphics & Animations
BRAND DEVELOPMENT — We worked with the festival director and team to create a new brand identity that would be reflective of the festival as a space for generating dialogue and conversation. The Mountains to Sea programme presents challenging concepts and ideas and we wanted to incorporate this into the identity.
In exploring the new identity we looked at all aspects of dialogue and communication within and around a book festival, including the books, the texts, the culture, the language, the authors and the audiences. Through our exploration, we started to look more closely at punctuation marks which organise text to give contextual sense and generate interplay between language and the reader. We investigated the colon, which acts as bridge between the speaker or writer and the listener or reader. We decided to work with the colon as a strong visual and conceptual representative of the festival’s role in the dialogue and communication between the audience and the authors.
The resulting logo design centres on the colon with graphics that are modern and clean creating a bridge and space for the programme to communicate with audiences. The chosen font combines modernity with classic characteristics that bring an authenticity and weight representative of the festival programming and presentation.
BROCHURE DESIGN — In creating the brochure cover we began with the blue logo as a starting point and then worked strong complementary colours into the cover and throughout the brochure. A different colour was chosen for each section of the festival programme to clearly mark out the different themes being explored within the festival. We decided to break with the traditional festival programme format and created instead a tabloid newspaper. The foldable tabloid format gave us the opportunity to give space to the books, authors, poets and artists being celebrated by the festival.
PHOTOGRAPHY PRODUCTION — Working within the studio we photographed a selection of the books included in the festival programme. The photography placed the book covers central stage and the clean bright coloured backgrounds kept the focus and the energy on the book covers and the authors.
PRINT ASSETS AND SOCIAL MEDIA CONTENT — The use of the colon in the new festival identity presented a strong graphic structure for forming multiple assets across formats, which when combined with the strong colours and studio book photography were applied to a full suite of printed and digital assets including social media covers, outdoor banners, adverts, posters, screen graphics, bookmarks, digital graphics and animations.
