Paula Scher: Sundance Film Festival Identity

Date
18 January 2012

Graphic design clients come in all shapes and sizes, but we’d wager that working for Robert Redford generates a special kind of buzz (“Hi Robert, loved you in Indecent Proposal. Now about that typeface…”). Pentagram’s Paula Scher had that experience recently when she was asked to design the identity for this year’s Sundance Film Festival started by RR in 1978. The 2012 theme is Look Again, inspired by the Henry Miller quote: “One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of seeing things,” and Paula and her team juxtaposed the spliced vernacular of movie-making with Utah’s glorious landscapes to awesome effect.

Paula said: "The identity provided a wonderful opportunity to combine the graphic representation of the movement of film done in the form of spliced and repeated typography against the calm majesty of photos of open skies and heroic mountains. It’s a great contrast.”

As usual the Pentagram website provides a fascinating insight into the development of the project and the way in which the team experimented with different degrees of the splice effect to create the perfect aesthetic.

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About the Author

Rob Alderson

Rob joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in July 2011 before becoming Editor-in-Chief and working across all editorial projects including itsnicethat.com, Printed Pages, Here and Nicer Tuesdays. Rob left It’s Nice That in June 2015.

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