Olhos music fest

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Olhos (eyes) music fest

Thanks to the increasing power of modern computers, humankind is facing the golden age of artificial intelligence. As a consequence, computer sensing techniques have been suffering from rapid improvement. Alike other fields, graphic design starts to benefit from such advances, for example, by evolving towards interactive designs which may be more eye-catchy and so be more efficient on the communication with people.

This project regards the creation of an interactive graphic design identity for a music festival in the Portuguese village “Olhos da Fervença” — Olhos Music Fest (Eyes Music Fest).

The main concept behind the branding was passing the energy and feeling of “what it is like to participate in the festival” — an extrovertive mood, with people dancing free.

Firstly, due to the importance of communicating the name of the festival, a logotype was created. However, branding and graphic identity may be pushed beyond creating a logo. In that sense, the next task was understanding how to translate the concept (“what it is like to participate in the festival”) into graphics. In other words: how to visualise the experience. We started by defining the very elementary units that compose the festival — music, space and people — and we used these as starting points to develop the brand.

Thanks to sound analysis, computer vision and image rendering techniques, the designs may react to sound and automatically be customized to different people.

Visualising space:

Visualising space may seem redundant unless an overlayer is added, offering a new perspective or further information. In that sense, using a camera and image rendering techniques, the visual environment was simplified into four ranges of brightness. These were represented by geometric symbols, creating a non-realistic way of visualising the space around. The low definition perspective may be interpreted as a psychoactive experience, passing the “extrovertive mood” part of the concept. This layer was used as a background pattern.

Visualising people:

Because the festivals’ name means “Eyes Music Fest”, the brand could not be completed without making the eyes, the main graphic motif. Though, for people visualisation, only eyes are used (one may recognise a friend, yet he/she remains anonymous for the crowds). These were used as the main unit to build eye-chains (dancing arms), which may work over the space visualisation or photos of people. Changing the inputs will consequently change outputs. Thus, by applying such visualisation techniques into the brand’s graphics, it was possible to create an interactive and personalisable brand.

Visualising music:

Because a brand must be unpaired, the solution for visualising music should not be a trivial sound visualiser. Instead, a dancing artefact which reacts to sound’s amplitude was developed — the “dancing free” part of the concept. The artefact mimics a boneless arm (chain) capable to spin itself around infinitely

Applications

The generated artefacts may be exported and then used to compose static or animated designs such as videos, posters or merchandising. These may also be used in real-time applications such as interactive posters, VJ performances or photo-spots in the festival’s venue.