zend
concept
event identity
poster campaign
content creation
2021
In the fall of 2021, the first edition of ᴢᴇɴᴅ took place, a media festival in The Hague. For this event we designed a poster concept and the brand identity.
The theme of this first edition was Protest. Differtent artists and creators were invited for panel talks and to exhibit their work. And of course, a borrel at the end.
The client encouraged us stay away from clichés and to go a little bit further. In the cultural field clients are often a bit more adventurous when it comes to design. They dare to be different. In other words, we were allowed to make it a little bit weird.
It should come as no surprise (hopefully) to non-dutch speakers that 'zend' means 'send' in dutch. This name for the festival is a reference that every type of media gets send outwards to the rest of the world, whether it's an image, video or sound.
So what symbolises to send something? One of the first associations we had is the paper plane icon. For years, this icon has been ubiquitous in any digital environment. If you pay attention to it, you see it in almost every app. We can conclude that 'send' = an icon of a paper plane and vice versa.
Even though this icon has become bit a cliché, we where kind of charmed by it. And so it becamse a starting point for the design concept of this project. "But how," you may ask. "I don't see any paper plane icons?" Well, you're right. We actually took a template for a folding a physical paper plane and used this grid as a foundation for the design. This is combination with bold typography and funky filtered images formed the foundation for all designs for ᴢᴇɴᴅ.
Together with the client we believed that this design would be very well suited for animation. We did the art direction for this and the vision was brought to life by the Belgian animation wizards of Toykyo.
Something that might be even more fun than delivering dazzling designs is creating the tools to do so. We've created a powerful template file for the in-house design team of PIP. All they had to do is insert a photo and change the text. The filter gave some unpredictable results which made it fun to play with. Below are some of our favourites that were used on social media.
Ready to raise your brand to the next level? We'd love to get to know you. And if there's a match — We'll be sure to make some dam good work.
Send us your dreams & memes at:
Email: hello@workanddam.com
