Responses by Matt Litzinger, president and chief creative officer, The Local Collective.
Background: Luminato is a multidisciplinary art festival featuring painting, sculpture, performance, thought-provoking speeches and dance, among others. Work gets displayed in unusual spaces, using the streets of Toronto as its stage; the festival takes place not only in downtown Toronto but across the Greater Toronto Area. However, it had never had a cohesive visual identity nor a consistent main message. As Toronto and the world emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic, there couldn’t have been a better time for Luminato to put a stake in the ground, establish its identity and get people talking.
Design thinking: We created visual iconography that celebrates the incredible effects of the art in Luminato. Art is a visceral experience. Artists create it to spark reactions. We captured those reactions in the simplest, most impactful way possible—using the punctuation that reflects them. An exclamation mark, quotation marks, a question mark, an ellipsis and a period comprise the visual identity for what artists create with their work and their patrons experience at Luminato.
Challenges: The multidisciplinary nature of the festival’s curation means that the target audience and experiences are broad and wide. We had to consider how to capture what all art can spark and what the experience can provoke. With such a broad challenge, it was critically important that we develop a solution that still felt personal, unique, and authentic to our experiences when we experience art in all its forms.
Favorite details: We’re so proud of how we could take something as monumentally huge of a category as “art” and make the communication feel so intimate to the person experiencing the show. The craft, through the type and bold punctuation, taps into our target’s experiences. Seeing it come to life and feeling it through the festival is special.
New lessons: We learned once again the power of art and messaging. Already, people are discussing the show and how this work has caused them to take notice.
Visual influences: Luminato is a vibrant artistic event—as the name implies. Light and illumination had to play a role in what we created, and we made sure that our color palette and choice of aesthetic were as vibrant as the works being shown.
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