Visual identity and website for the music festival
Porto Celtic Fest 2011 took place in one of Porto’s main theaters. Musicians from all over the world came to participate with the goal of spreading the Celtic music tradition, which—surprising as it may be for some—is also Portuguese.
We were asked to create a modern identity system that would appeal to younger people while using some of the Celtic music references and avoiding overused clichés, like medievally inspired typefaces and primitive Celtic symbols.
Our solution was to represent the traditional instruments—violin, banjo, Celtic harp and Irish flute—and the letters with free vectorial drawings. By combining these graphic elements into a series of flexible blocks, we were able to create the compositions for all needed formats.
The website of the festival was part of the overall identity design process. We took the information blocks that we created for the posters and adapted them to a long horizontal scroll while adding relevant information—what would be traditionally the inner pages—on hidden dialogs.
Due to time and some bureaucratic constraints we decided to host the site for free on Tumblr. We used Tumblr’s dynamic content capabilities to populate the dialogs and keep them updatable by the festival team.