Responses by Mike Alderson, cofounder, ManvsMachine.

Background: Our task was to design and direct the visual brand campaign for OFFF Barcelona 2024. OFFF is a festival of creativity, a world-renowned showcase of contemporary visual culture and design. The audience is anyone in the creative community, from designers, directors, visual artists and sound designers, to thinkers, theorists, technologists, educators and students.

Design core: We liked the idea of somehow capturing a visual representation of the collective OFFF experience, so we began exploring various ideas around personalities, moods and feelings, which eventually led us to the concept of “lifeforms”—or LIFFFE/FFFORMS in the context of OFFF.

We firmly believe that first and foremost, every project should work on an “eye-candy” level, pure aesthetic enjoyment that requires no real thought to enjoy. But there can be meaning and intelligence contained within for those who wish to engage with the work. So, we set about designing a family of abstract lifeforms, each one representing a feeling or emotion associated with the creative process that would resonate on some level with every speaker and attendee at OFFF. It felt important to cover negative emotions as well as positive, so the shortlist became curiosity, excitement, nervousness, distraction, exhaustion, fulfillment, anxiety and connection. To further strengthen the link to the festival itself, we decided these lifeforms would descend in the thousands, gathering en masse in a final scene.

Challenges: For us as designers, open briefs are definitely more challenging than being given a specific challenge or problem that needs solving with a client brief. Arriving at our final concept without the usual guard rails took us a little longer than it usually would. We also wanted to challenge ourselves to arrive at an aesthetic that was slightly outside our comfort zone, the intention being people would not automatically assume it was a ManvsMachine project on first viewing.

Visual influences: As well as working in motion, we wanted each character to be strangely beautiful as a standalone object. So, we drew inspiration from makers of abstract homewares and ceramics, such as Studio Arhoj. Don’t tell anyone, but there might even be a limited edition run of tiny sculptures hidden randomly around the event in Barcelona. Finders keepers!

Time constraints: As with any passion project, the OFFF graphics had to be scheduled around other client work. We made sure the creative was modular enough for artists in our London and Los Angeles studios to jump in and out of as they found time.

Alternate paths: If we could do anything differently, we would have made it even weirder!

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