Wax on, wax offf

OFFF festival is well awaited and appreciated in the design and branding communities. It first kicked off(f) in Barcelona, Spain, and soon opened sibling venues all over the world, inviting creators to take a break from work and gather ‘round to meet, greet, get inspired, repeat. This year, we had the honor and pleasure of branding the festival’s local venue, which took place in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and featured both local and global guests – including yours truly. Talk about design-ception. As attendees, visiting the festival and get acquainted with colleagues, trends and processes is super important to us. We encourage everyone at Firma to go and have a good time, as it is an inseparable part of what we do. The only way to evolve is to get involved. And now, an opportunity presented itself to go even deeper: coming up with a concept and language that will be the face and heart of OFFF. How does one design and brand a design and branding festival?

Look around you

So here’s what we know: the majority of guests are designers – graphic, brand, motion– and they love what they do so much, that they’re traveling across ponds to mingle and learn. They’re curious, involved and thirsty for something that will spark their inner ambition. So this is a professional convention that’s supposed to be a wonderland of shared knowledge and art. Also, just plainly, IT SHOULD BE FUN. Fun and joy are part of the job. We are all emotionally connected to what we do. Our motto at Firma is Empowering People. Humans are our bread and butter, both as colleagues and clients: it’s all about people, their lives, stories and feelings. We wanted to capture that diversity in a way that also interfaces with where we are. Tel Aviv is a tiny power-city is a small country, and during its relatively short existence, is has done the absolute impossible by becoming a bustling hub of culture, art and creation. Tel Aviv is for everyone. It’s beautiful and showy, aesthetic and scribbled, pioneering and traditional. We decided to create a visual event that captures minds, hearts and first and foremost: eyes.

Can’t take
my eyes offf you

Eyes are mirrors to the soul and a window to emotions. They’re the first thing we lay on anything, the basic condition for love at first sight. Research shows that eye movement is a key element in decoding data and processing experiences. You can eat with your eyes and definitely shop with your eyes – cheers to our bank accounts. You can make eye contact and convey so much without saying a thing. Eyes are pure and raw instinct, and so the concept that we came up with is A FEAST FOR THE EYES. The graphic language is colorful, upbeat and playful. It presents eyes in different sizes, colors and textures, marrying its main element of local Levantine culture, with a modern, fresh design. Upon fruition, we carried on creating an entire world featuring the eyes, including socks, tote bags, signs, icicle wrappers and screened effects. One of the main visual events was a wall full of motion graphic eyes, looking around, to which we’ve added sound that were designed especially for OFFF.

This is how we described the idea: “Eyes are like a mouth for visions. They hunger for fresh style and iconic grace. Art for the eyes, is like fries for the soul. This place is the main course. Use your vision mouth. Have a taste or chug it down, devour beauty, gobble delicious tech and feast your eyes on every piece of creative innovation this world has to offer. But also, get fries :)”.

OFFF 2019 – it was a blast! Thank you for the art, inspiration and the wonderful company.