Oslo Classics Festival: A New Visual Identity

Identity, typography, website, and print, April to October 2022.

Oslo Classics Festival asked us to rebuild how the festival looks and reads, from the identity through to the website, the posters, and everything handed out at the door. The work ran from April to October 2022, with Alexander Sylte embedded with the festival as Brand and Image Director rather than briefed from the outside. A festival programme moves constantly, with artists confirmed late and dates changing, so being inside the organisation was the only way to keep one standard across everything that went out.

Classical music carries an inheritance that most brands would envy and few know what to do with. Play it too reverently and the festival looks like an institution addressing people who already attend. Play it down and it loses the reason anyone comes. The identity holds both by letting the typography argue: Cardinal Photo, a display serif with real weight, carries the festival's own voice at large sizes, while Neue Haas Grotesk handles everything a programme is actually made of, which is dates, venues, times, and the names of performers. One typeface makes the case for the festival, the other makes the information easy to read at eight point on a flyer in a foyer.

A festival publishes in bursts. A concert is announced, a programme changes, a venue is added, and each of those has to appear as a poster, a page, a story, and a printed line in the same week. The system is built for that rhythm: fixed type scale, one grid, and rules for how images and text meet, so a new announcement is a matter of filling the pattern rather than designing again. The festival can produce material without a designer standing over it, which is what an identity is for.

The website was built on Squarespace with custom development where the platform stopped. The pages answer the four questions an audience arrives with, which are who is playing, when, where, and how to get a ticket, and the editorial pages give artists and programmes room to be read rather than skimmed.

Photography ran through the season alongside the design, so the identity was filled with the festival's own images rather than illustrated with material bought in. Posters, flyers, programmes, and the social material all came out of the same system, produced in the same months as the concerts they announced.

Scope

— Brand strategy
— Creative direction
— Visual identity and typographic system
— Website architecture, design, and custom development
— Copy and messaging
— Poster design and print
— Photography and image direction
— Content production and social assets

Brand and Image Director, embedded April to October 2022: Alexander Sylte.

Send an enquiry: hei@syltestudios.com