Stacking Flavours / Melba 2024

While the previous festival identities were marked by striking, eye-catching designs and the fluidity of the “melting” ice cream, this year’s visual identity draws inspiration from the practice of “stacking”, as in layering or even putting one flavour on top of another. This approach highlights the interplay of form, structure, and creativity in design as a whole, with the layers symbolising the diversity of the event’s lecturers, disciplines, ideas, methods, etc. in particular. 

Once again, we’re sticking to mixing “ice creaminess” with design aesthetics, but this time, we're adding more pronounced structural elements that help the identity become easily scalable and adaptable. For example, the rounded rectangles, reflecting the shapes designers often use to create web buttons or other visual elements, can be scaled up or down and topped with a cherry to put everything together in place.

The colour scheme employs a dark brown, chocolaty background that serves as a deep, heavy, but curious base for a selection of 9 fresh and vivid colours, representing 9 notorious ice cream flavours. Lastly, the selected typeface is recognizable and distinctive, but it also has a slight sweetness to it, ice cream-like, but without overdo(s)ing it.

Using this formula we created an environment for an identity that is visually catching, appealing and memorable with its balance of unusual colour combinations and clean and simple forms.