Lennarts & de Bruijn’s “hot as hell” campaign for Utrecht club, Ekko

How do you make a sweaty club look tempting in the hot summer months? You call design studio Lennarts & de Bruijn to make you a series of naughty moving posters.

This was the case for Poppodium Ekko, a night club which according to Google reviews is the “best place to dance all night in Utrecht”. The venue “needed a suitable campaign for the summer period, communicating the opening for clubbin’ every Thursday, Friday and Saturday,” the studio tells It’s Nice That. “The campaign needed have the same energy as how Ekko presents itself, with both interesting in copy as well as visuals. They asked us to use our humour, to balance the look in autonomy and commerciality, and to not be too abstract.”

Lennarts & de Bruijn has answered Ekko’s design prayers with the freedom they were given to achieve the final designs. “They asked us for a poster campaign… whether that means one poster, a series, moving or still, was up to us.” The studio jumped into the pool of animated posters, a first for them, “this was a new experiment which gave us the chance to develop our skills further since we’ve never made these kind of animations before”.

The message of summer, sticky backs lathered with suncream, beachballs and tight speedos are represented via illustrations in a bright colour palette. Whether the poster is moving or not, the studio have created a campaign “that should get your ass to the vacation paradise called Ekko and enjoy your summer.”

As we unfortunately cannot speak Dutch, Lennarts & de Bruijn explains that the copy mentions the fact that “Ekko cannot offer its audience, like the beach and the sun…followed up by a counter offer of what it could give you when attending an event there,” they say. “These offers play with the ambiguity of words suggesting erotic vibes. These suggestions were the starting point in creating the illustrations that developed from cliched summer things.” Although “the copy is brilliant in Dutch but hard to translate,” Lennarts & de Bruijn explains they “tried our very best to make it look sexy, funny, a bit stupid and hot as hell”.