2024
Brand identity
Posters, outdoor, signage
Self-initiated

Frame

Nine films, one poster, and no honest way to show them all. Frame gives up on the still and puts the viewfinder on the wall instead - four black corners, and whatever falls inside them is the festival.

A roadside billboard against a blue sky: Independent Film Fest in black and green on a yellow ground, with a film still held inside four black viewfinder corners and the dates 15/06 to 18/06. — Roadside The system at full size

The still is never the festival

Almost every festival poster is a film still with a headline on top. It is the obvious move and it works exactly once, because the still belongs to one title in a programme of nine. Choose it and you have advertised a single film; the other eight arrive as small print along the foot of the sheet.

A large festival can absorb that. An independent one cannot. Nobody knows the titles, nobody knows the directors, and the audience is being asked to buy a ticket to a festival rather than to the film on the poster. Worse, a distributor's poster for any one of those films has stars, a budget and a retoucher behind it. Fighting on the same ground - one seductive image - is a fight lost before the paste dries.

The festival poster in a glazed street display: a yellow sheet with Independent Film Fest set large, a still of a figure with a red telephone, and nine film titles in three columns at the foot. — Street display One layout, nine titles at the foot

Frame the shot, don't pick it

So the identity is not an image. It is the mark made before there is one: the four corners of a viewfinder, the crop a director works inside. They are the only thing all nine films have in common, and the only thing the festival owns outright.

Set large, the corners stop reading as a logo and start reading as a window. Any still drops into it. Nine films become nine posters off one layout, and next year's programme needs no redesign at all. Nothing has to be chosen, so nothing is left out.

Emptied and cut in vinyl, the same four corners work with no image inside them. Stuck to a real window, they hand the job to the street: whatever is on the other side is the shot.

Four black viewfinder corners cut in vinyl and applied to a window in a brick wall, framing the pale glass with no image inside them. — Vinyl on glass The mark with nothing in it

Four rectangles, cheap to run

The corners carry the rest of the system on their own. Reduced to two brackets they become the logotype, frame in lowercase. Repeated on a slant they become a pattern for flags and banners. There is nothing else to draw.

Everything around them is deliberately thin: yellow, black, one green for emphasis, and a condensed grotesque with the word INDEPENDENT set on a rising slant, so it reads like a correction pencilled onto the official programme. Most applications print in a single ink. Four rectangles cut in vinyl, weave into a flag and scale from a sticker to a hoarding without a redraw, which is what a festival with no brand budget actually needs.

A tall yellow banner hanging from a stone facade, printed with black viewfinder corners repeated on a slant as an all-over pattern. — Street banner The mark as pattern

The poster pasted to a stone stair column, with a different film still inside the frame and the frame logotype at the foot of the sheet. — Pasted up Same sheet, different still

A small yellow Independent Film Fest sticker applied to the perforated back of a white park bench under olive trees. — Park bench Type only, no frame needed

What it comes down to

A festival that could not afford to sell a film sold the thing that makes anything a film: somebody decided where the edges go. The frame belongs to no title on the bill, costs one ink to print, and reads the same on a park bench and on a motorway.

A self-initiated Bored Jar project. The festival, its dates and the nine film titles are invented. The photographs inside the frame are stock images licensed for commercial use, not a commissioned shoot.

Design work

hello@boredjar.com