Nouvelle Administration looks to op-art for Mutek festival identity

For the 17th edition of Mutek, a digital creativity and electronic music festival in Montreal, the organiser approached creative agency Nouvelle Administration to develop the identity. “The look and feel had to evoke a festival about digital technology and avant-garde electronic music but also warmth, human experience and springtime,” say the designers. The brief was to develop a coherent set of visuals across digital and printed materials and the project took four months to complete.

Nouvelle Administration set out to explore the concept that every person would have a unique experience at the festival. “We then played around with this idea of duality, reality and perception,” say the designers. “Our formula was simple: we developed six or seven different abstract merging patterns and cropped imagery. We had way too many images at first, and way too many choices to make. Eventually we understood what images worked best together. We wanted the viewer to understand both images but in a very subtle way.” The creative team took visual cues from nature photography and op-art to create the necessary juxtapositions across the whole identity.