Keying into the Brain

In the Netherlands, there’s a festival that started a few years ago to celebrate audiovisual and interactive media. This coming May 22nd in Hilversum, the day will be filled with screenings and presentations, culminating with the Gouden Reigers 2012 ceremony. This awards show recognises the best audiovisual and interactive communication projects of the past year. A pretty amazing day, and Edenspiekermann were asked to redesign the accompanying catalogue and identity.

January involved a kick-off meeting with the enthusiastic KITB team, Hans Booms and myself. I’ll be honest, from speaking to such passionate organisers and researching all the entries in the show, it was a special project to work on. Therefore, when brainstorming, our concept naturally came out of three insights to the festival:

1. Interactivity
There are ten categories (ranging from apps to internet to film) and seventy-three entries in the Gouden Reigers. Each of these entries is dynamic, engaging and tangible: pieces you can physically interact with.

2. Process
As the name goes, ‘Keying into the Brain’ directly acknowledges the process of generating ideas as well as creating the interactive media and strategies.

3. Connections
Despite not being well known–yet–outside of the Netherlands, KITB allows people to meet and network with others whom they might not cross paths with.

Oh, and of course this whole event is a celebration of the work and bringing that to the forefront. Hence our main image, created (lovingly and labouring-ly) by our past American intern Jon (Bovi) Lucas. By creating the typography out of thread we wanted to make the catalogue feel tangible like the entries themselves. The whole process of making the type directly came from the three insights. We carried these elements through to the interior of the catalogue also, with the threads interacting with the content. Emily Fischer (our current–and coincidently also American–intern) put hard time into giving all the entries the justice and detail they deserved in the catalogue, creating some wonderful graphic design.

We’re all excited to see how the day turns out. So check our video of the process. And with 504 needles left over, I think we all need to try out some acupuncture to relax after that work.