Vrints-Kolsteren’s identity for electronic music festival Gabonsa frames it as an “adventure playground”

It makes sense for a lot of festival identities to capitalise on talent, after all, the line-up is what pulls so many of us in. It’s only when you get to a festival that you really remember everything else that comes along with it: the charming (or character building) experience of having to sleep in a tent you’ve badly pitched for a few nights, the sense of play, escapism and adventure that comes from being in a landscape big enough to host all of the action and, of course, all the people you meet – the temporary community formed at the site of the sound.

What first stood out to Naomi Kolsteren and Vincent Vrints, cofounders of Antwerp-based Vrints-Kolsteren, about Gabonsa, an electronic music festival that takes place in Austria every summer, was the event’s unique relationships with its surroundings and community. Set on the backdrop of Innsbruck’s mountainous landscape, Gabonsa is a festival that presents itself as “not just a music event but a place to explore, connect and feel at home”, shares Naomi. “It’s a landscape, a community and an immersive summer experience rooted in its local environment.”

Determined to prioritise this sense of place in their branding for the music festival, the pair started out their design research with some fieldwork: “We began by looking into the local fauna and flora around the festival site in Innsbruck,” Vincent says. “The mountain panorama, grass, hills and wide open views are key to Gabonsa’s character, so we wanted the visual language to feel grown from that place rather than applied on top of it,” the designer shares.

Vincent and Naomi’s foraging led to some interesting finds amongst local wildlife and animals, which they recorded like ecologists with photos, illustrations and scans of delicate flowers and plants. Merging this tactile research with digital tools, the studio translated their images and drawings into a series of flexible, decorative design elements for the identity that were able to spread out across multiple formats. On screen, the scans began to introduce “texture, depth and small imperfections that feel human and tactile” to anything that would have felt too slick and digital, says Vincent. In the layering system the designers established it was important that things didn’t feel too repetitive: line drawings and light impressions act as background textures in places and more experimental overlays in others. Each asset shifts how things overlap across festival posters, social posts and in the way finding found on site.

As for the type, this had to be something that felt equally as organic – an element that paid homage to Gabonsa’s rocky, mountainous location. “We wanted typography that felt really confident but also human and expressive,” Naomi shares. “Rather than treating it as something fixed, we use it in a playful and flexible way across posters and flyers by placing and composing the letters differently each time.” This challenge led the studio to cut out it’s own custom logotype, producing a playful and flexible set of letterforms that scale to all sorts of sizes and formats. The logotypes G even became a very interesting printed form for a festival invite. Equally as modular as their illustrated elements, these curly, spiral letterforms were what really mirrored the feeling of discovery that runs through the festival. “The type became part of the landscape in the layout,” Naomi ends, “shifting, overlapping and responding to all of the other graphic elements.”