01 — The Brief
One festival, nineteen shows, no single sound.
RBMA Festival LA ran across most of October 2017 — Ryoji Ikeda scoring a hundred idling cars, SOPHIE's live debut, an Alice Coltrane tribute with Flying Lotus, a night at Hollywood Forever. Public-Library built the identity around “the passage of perception”; it needed a layer of texture that could hold all of that range without flattening it.
My brief: a set of hand-drawn surface patterns that worked at every scale and budget — a billboard on Sunset, a xeroxed handbill, a phone screen in a dark room.
02 — Approach
Many marks, one hand.
I drew the patterns by hand — hatching, mazes, confetti, loose scribble — a family of marks Public-Library could pull from for any event artwork or surface, distinct from each other but loose enough to still read as one set when they sat side by side on a wall.
- — Hand-drawn, then built as seamless repeats
- — Tuned to Public-Library's type and color
- — Tested small (handbill) before large (wrap)
A set of hand-drawn motifs — hatching, mazes, confetti, swirl — built as seamless repeats and color-matched to the identity, so the cheap flyer and the ten-storey wrap are visibly the same family.
A family of marks
Each pattern its own texture — hatch, maze, confetti, scribble — but all unmistakably drawn by the same hand.
Tiling at any size
Drawn as true repeats, so a motif holds its rhythm on a handbill and on the side of a building.
Across OOH and digital
Billboards, wheatpastes, building wraps, social — the patterns are what tie the campaign together.
In use — a different pattern in every event's artwork
Public-Library set each night's poster on one of the patterns — hatch for the punk talk, meander for the studio sessions, whorl for the Alice Coltrane tribute.
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Hand-drawn patterns in the suite
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Festival events under one visual identity
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Days of programming — October 6–30, 2017
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Hand-drawn source art — every mark original
The patterns carried a month of programming across LA and never once fought the type. Getting to sit that quietly inside someone else's system is its own kind of result.
