Describe the visual identity of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry 2013 in five words.
Interactive. Fluid. Puzzle-like. Painterly. Whimsical.
What inspired your design?
I looked through tons of Brooklyn-based designs from the turn of the century when researching possible identity directions for the festival; illustrations and designs from cultural events, advertisements, old ferry tickets etc., but in the end decided to approach Brooklyn as I see it today.
The designer in action |
The painting used in the design was created by layering painted transparencies on top of one another like in screen-printing or cellular animation (like old cartoons). This process is itself somewhat puzzle-like; breaking an image into shapes by tone (for instance the body of the guitar was one shape, the fret board and depth of the guitar, another, etc.), then compiling them from light to dark. The result is a tonally flattened, graphic spin on last year’s identity, which we really liked.
You paired this more analog technique with very advanced web technology. What exactly is responsive layout and how did it factor into the design of the website?
We started from a web-usability angle. I was inspired by a script called Isotope, which is an amazing bit of code that rearranges web content based on user filtering. It’s perfect for festival info because it can show a data set in multiple views (by schedule, or by headliner status etc.). It's also perfect for creating responsive layouts (fluid layouts, which can re-flow to fit any device or browser size in a bespoke way), so we knew it would work well as both an informational site on a desktop and a festival guide on the phone. We were interested in pushing Isotope's functionality a step further to also rearrange the backgrounds associated with individual pieces of data in a puzzle-like fashion.
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CrossingBrooklynFerry.com |
Mobile website |
What’s the story behind the Whitman beard?
Haha! I wonder if people pick up on that reference. The title “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” comes from the last poem in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. When we first started designing, I printed it out and had it in the studio along with a portrait of Whitman. The poem is so beautiful and really captures the Brooklyn experience, and more specifically the feeling of being in the thick of a dense crowd, so it seemed appropriate to play up this element in the festival design. At the same time, the reference is meant to be tangential; after all, it's not a Walt Whitman festival—so I decided to replace his face with the festival branding. This graphic decapitation adds an element of whimsical obscurity to the design and speaks to the iconoclastic spirit of the festival itself.
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