OFFF Festival

CUBE

Barcelona’s OFFF Festival is the biggest event in the global design calendar, so to be asked to create this year’s visual campaign, alongside an invitation to speak, was an absolute honour. Working closely with design agency Vasava and audio studio Combustion, we designed the campaign for this year’s festival. Our animations and key visuals form a creative enlightenment story centred around the simplest 3D form; the cube.

Our hero character, CUBE, embodies OFFF’s diverse audience, whilst each new area it explores represents the learning experience of OFFF’s talks and workshops. Through considered animation and behaviour, our curious hero navigates the five stages of the creative process that comprise each chapter.

CHAPTERS

Our brief was to imagine OFFF as a ‘cabinet of curiosities’, a container for all of the festival’s talks, workshops, and exhibitions. We wrote a chapter-based narrative that follows six elements of creativity; Discovery, Insight, Entertainment, Process, Connections, and Mastery. Once activated, the resulting structure presents a complex of unique doorways that become gateways to these varied experiences for CUBE, as it waits at the thresholds with anticipation.

ROOMS

To tell our creative enlightenment story, we designed five architectural spaces and experiences for our character to explore. From industrial support structures and futuristic complexes to jaw-dropping audiovisual rigs, each setting presents a challenge for CUBE to solve before it can progress to the next stage of its creative development.

OUR HERO

To mirror our central narrative, we needed CUBE to convey OFFF’s audience’s excitement and learning. The translucent design has an internal gyroscopic mechanism, allowing us to see its curiosity as it scans each room and playfully expresses itself. Despite its basic structure, CUBE’s form is dynamic. We see it change shape as it travels, increasing its number of facets and decreasing as its speed changes. The inner cube’s light also responds to a stimulus, emitting maximum intensity at faster speeds to allude to the expansive effect of creative flow on our brains.

COLLABORATION

This project was a genuine collaboration between Vasava, Combustion Studio and Found. Vasava created the overall framework, direction and execution of the whole campaign, while Combustion bought texture and depth to accentuate the narrative with their sound design. We took charge of the visual execution and development of Vasava’s original cube concept. Seen together, the campaign is a beautifully fitting celebration of this world-renowned design festival.