Three editions of a documentary festival about the forms life takes — and an identity that changed shape along with it.
The brief
An international documentary film festival about the environment and the forms life takes on this planet, held in Perm for three years running.
The first edition had no name recognition and no festival-going habit to lean on. The identity had to work as street advertising months before anyone knew what it was advertising, and it had to hold a five-day programme across several venues without needing a second visual language for the small stuff — the badge, the ticket, the flyer left on a table.
By the third year the festival had an audience, a reputation and a different kind of problem: how to look like it had grown up without looking like a different festival.
The idea
The wordmark sets the two halves of the name as a single continuous form with one red letter at its centre — a living thing is one object made of parts. It rotates to vertical without losing legibility, which is what lets a single lockup serve an A1 poster, a bag seam, a lanyard and a painted wall.
It is also the one element that survived all three editions untouched. Everything else was allowed to move.
Art direction
Across four editions I chose the illustrator, wrote the brief, and directed the work to delivery. What I asked for was never a finished image, because a finished image can only be used once.
2021, Bella Leyn. Printmaking textures, but drawn as separable objects at one line weight — stones, birds, houses — so that a poster, a tote and a painted wall could each be composed from the same set without anything being redrawn. The brief was a parts list, not a scene.
2022, Bella Leyn. Same hand, new structure. The sheet now split into two flat fields, so every drawing had to survive being cut in half and read from both sides of the seam — a turbine rooted in the white and blading into the dark. That constraint went into the brief before the first sketch.
2023, Lyuba Berezina. A different hand on purpose: painted, one figure growing into a landscape, because by the third year the festival could afford to stop assembling and start depicting. The brief changed from parts to a single picture with a path left open for the ribbon to travel through.
Choosing whose hand fits which year, writing the constraint into the brief, sending work back, and knowing when to stop — that is the part of the job that leaves no artefact on this page.
The first year runs on a printmaking vocabulary: monotype and linocut textures, stacked stones, wading birds, small red houses. Nothing in the kit is a fixed illustration — it is a set of pieces recomposed for every carrier, so a poster, a tote and a wall share a language without ever repeating a picture.
Illustration, first edition: Bella Leyn.
Palette · 2021
A documentary festival about ecology is expected to arrive in greens and browns. This one runs on a vermilion that behaves like printing ink, a cobalt borrowed from the birds, and a forest green kept dark enough to hold white type.
A festival poster is easy. The programme is the hard object.
The programme
Every festival has the same impossible print job: the whole schedule, legible, on something that folds into a coat pocket. Colour does the sorting before any reading starts — each day takes a ground, each event type a block.
Screens
A festival is not only printed. The venue runs on LED walls and the screenings open on a cinema screen ten metres wide, and both were drawn from the same kit rather than bought as a template.
The second year keeps the printed texture and puts it on a new structure. The sheet divides into two flat fields and the illustration crosses the seam between them — a turbine rooted in the white half with its blades in the dark one, a walking figure stepping out of the picture and into the colour.
A grid of soft circles arrives as the one new device of that year. It fills whatever the illustration leaves empty, so a poster is never half a picture and half a hole.
And the wordmark moves between the fields: in the dark block at the top of one sheet, in the saturated block at the foot of the other. Same lockup, working as a masthead in one and as a signature in the other.
Illustration, second edition: Bella Leyn.
By the third year the festival had an audience and could afford to be less literal. The printed textures gave way to painted illustration — a single figure growing into the landscape, rather than a landscape assembled out of separate parts — and a serpentine ribbon took over the job of carrying dates and venues around the image.
The palette moved with it, into a deep emerald that reads as forest, water and film stock at once. The wordmark did not move at all, which is the only reason the two years read as the same festival.
Illustration, third edition: Lyuba Berezina.
Palette · 2023
Sampled from the printed key visual. The deep green does the work the vermilion used to do — it is the colour people recognise from across a foyer.
On the ground
The part of a festival identity that cannot be faked in a mockup: a printed wall in a brick room lit for atmosphere rather than for reproduction, a roll-up in a badly lit corridor, a flyer that has to survive being left on a bar table.
Shown here as a design proposal. The Moscow edition was developed but never ran — the funding did not come together.
The brief was a move to Moscow and a broader, more general audience. The identity was re-cut for it: a lighter condensed display face, flat gouache illustration in place of painting, and a single saturated ground with the mark reversed out of it. The wordmark and the one-body construction stayed, as they had for three years before.
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