Design Challenge and Design Ideas

“Our challenge was to deliver a creative campaign for Dublin Fringe Festival’s 2020 edition while working within all COVID-19 restrictions but still capturing the magic, joy and intimacy that are associated with Fringe, always wary of the fact that the festival too would exist under severe constraints, if at all.

Fringe termed the festival their Pilot Light Edition and pledged to “Keep Her Lit”. To embody this spirit of defiance, our treatment, “Project A New Future”, used a light, an enduring metaphor for creativity, that emanated through the darkness of uncertain days and dramatically illuminated the faces of the artists used in the campaign.

As with so much of 2020, what went before went out the window. Dublin, the festival’s own stage was removed and our artists (Karen Miano and Kévin Coquelard) were suspended in a lilac limbo, symbolic of the empty stasis of the year.”

How the brief was fulfilled

“Despite so much of our day-to-day life moving online into digital space, Fringe persevered with live performances where possible, and wanted to create a physical brochure to accompany the festival acting as both a marketing tool, a guide to the festival and a vital keepsake in line with all previous editions.

Karen and Kévin were chosen as representatives of the breadth and depth of talent that would appear in the 2020 edition of Fringe and would become the faces of the festival’s brochures, print posters and digital content.

We worked with photographer Ellius Grace, renowned in particular for his portraiture. The imagery focused on extreme close-ups that suggested the intimacy missing in a year defined by distancing, with light carefully drawn across their faces using a bespoke lighting set-up.

Portraits of the artists graced the cover of the brochure — Karen on the front and Kevin on the rear — which was otherwise unadorned. Instead, the festival’s title and dates were printed on a transparent dust jacket which hugged the brochure.

Thematically, the artists and their inspirational light were burning through this semi-obscuring veil; physically the jackets made for a beautiful artefact, unique to this most challenging of years. Inside, the brochure adhered to a strict stylistic minimalism diet of just three colours: purple, dark grey and white a contrast from the colour coded array presented in 2019.”