Design Indaba
Design Indaba is one of South Africa’s largest annual creative industry events and is attended by close to 4000 of the best international creative professionals.
The Challenge
The Design Indaba Festival celebrates creativity in all shapes and forms. This year’s campaign had one main objective: let delegates ’experience the wonder of creativity’. Our challenge was to create a festival identity that would capture ‘creativity’ and let delegates experience it visually.
The Solution
We created an identity that, like this year’s festival campaign, explored the elusive, ever-changing nature of ‘creativity’ and the creative process: how every person sees and experiences it differently; how creative ideas are born from a faint spark, then grow and develop into something brilliant and wonderful.
Inspired by this, we used light as a visual metaphor for the creative process and used vibrant colourful images and a flexible typographic system to convey a sense of motion and dynamism – even in static 2D elements.
Look & Feel
The look and feel was brought to life and used to transform the festival venue by applying it across various campaign elements – from the colourful flags and steps that welcomed festival-goers as they arrived, to the vibrant signage in the registration area, the auditorium, interactive installations, the stage, audio-visual elements, and more.
Exterior Branding
The existing Piazza stairs were transformed by our campaign's vibrant colours. Since this was the first element delegates would see as they arrived each day, poems were written to reflect the elusive nature of the creative process. These were placed in unusual areas on the stairs, for delegates to discover while approaching and walking up. These poems were written to be read step-by-step, from the bottom of the stairs to the top - a process in itself.
Speaker Installation
Every year part of our brief is to introduce festival-goers to the conference speakers. They are often only announced the week of the conference, so making them visible is extremely important. Our solution was to design and build a colossal structure of light, growing from the marble foyer downstairs and continuing up to the second floor in the chandelier foyer.
Speaker Installation
To announce this year’s Design Indaba festival speaker line-up, we created video portraits of the speakers. These were displayed on a large, modular LED display, and integrated into our double-storey speaker installation. The faces were treated to look like hologram projections. Featuring quirky and strange video portraits of each speaker, the video gave festival-goers a glimpse into each speaker’s personality, and helped build anticipation about their upcoming talk.
Daily Holograms
To give delegates the chance to experience the wonder of creativity, we created an interactive flyer that transforms delegates’ smartphones into hologram viewers. Each flyer contained a viewing prism that delegates could use, with their smartphones, to experience a bespoke holographic animation.
The holographic story unfolded over three days and uses light as a central character to bring the creative process to life - how an idea is born from a spark, evolves with colour and movement, and develops into something vibrant and extraordinary.
The Holobooth
The world first hologram-selfie generating booth - launched in 2016 at the Design Indaba.
The Holobooth is a portable video booth that films and processes selfie videos into hologram-selfies, allowing you to view them simply using your smartphone and our viewing prism. It revolutionises
the photo booth and reinvents the selfie by combining them with holographic imagery, giving the user a new and seamless experience.
