DEMO Fest 2027, starring… you? Submit your motion design for a chance to be screened worldwide

Motion designers, your time is now. DEMO Festival 2027 continues to prove how far the practice and art form has come along. Founded by Studio Dumbar/DEPT® and Global, the free and open-to-the-public festival is one of a kind, making delightful use of public screens to foster creativity, community and experimentation within an always evolving motion design landscape. Everywhere you go, motion design is making movements alongside you. It’s often a uniquely transient form of design, one that you see in train stations – much like the very one that the festival began in: Amsterdam Centraal, where in 2019, up to 80 screens were populated with boundary-pushing design. Seven years later, it has gradually grown in size and stature, opening its doors to even more designers than ever.

What sets DEMO apart is its unique format – for 24 hours, advertising spaces across cities are taken over and turned into a curated, non-commercial showcase of motion design. From train stations and shopping streets to large-scale urban screens, the festival replaces ads with experimental, artistic and playful digital works, bringing motion design directly into daily life. At last year’s DEMO Festival, the initiative reached a major milestone with its first global Cities Edition, expanding to 15 cities across Europe and North America, including Los Angeles and Vancouver, transforming hundreds of the screens we look at every day into a synchronised, worldwide stage for motion design. Millions of passersby across continents experience these screens, but not quite in this fashion: through a 24-hour exhibition of cutting edge visuals.

Digital-out-of-home partners Global, blowUP media, Adtrackmedia, Warexpo and NEORT all joined this unique initiative by offering ad-free screen space for the festival, lending the festival a powerful screen presence that is otherwise nearly impossible to co-ordinate. Screens at train stations across fifteen major cities in the Netherlands, including Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht, as well as screens in international cities such as Antwerp, Brussels, Barcelona, Madrid, Warsaw, Vancouver, and Tokyo, will showcase beautiful works from artists around the world.

Here’s where you come in. Yes, you, excitable motion designer. Central to DEMO is its open call, which invites designers from all backgrounds and levels of experience to submit work, whether you’re reading this from your university studio or you’re deep into a decade-spanning career. It’s for the emerging and the established to participate and push the creative boundaries of non-commercial work. Evidently, DEMO’s open calls have been a roaring success, resulting in a highly diverse range of submissions from typographic experiments to abstract animations and 3D worlds. Last year, the festival received over 5,000 submissions from nearly 2,000 designers across 90 countries. That’s the growing relevance of motion design in numbers!

The selected works are curated by the great minds over at DEMO, consisting of Liza Enebeis, creative director and partner of Studio Dumbar/DEPT, motion designer Connor Campbell, creative coder and educator Tim Rodenbröker, multi-disciplinary artist Koos Breen, and 3D studio Yonk. Each edition is constructed around thematic categories that aim to highlight trends, experimentation and new developments in motion design, such as Stranger Things, Algorithmic Adventures or Type Only.

Beyond the public screens, DEMO also functions as a platform for exchange and learning. With its festival hub at Amsterdam Central Station, the event hosts talks, workshops, and guided tours, bringing together designers, studios, and the public to reflect on the future of motion design and its role in public space. “DEMO is there to celebrate the work,” Liza told It’s Nice That last year. “It’s not a competition… It’s about creating the best exhibition as a whole collective. From the start, it was not about the most established names. Within the group of participants, there were people literally showcasing the first piece they had ever made in motion.”