The festival needed a new logo, and to address this, they created a competition for anyone to enter. The prize, 25,000DKK and of course, the honour of having your logo on all the material.
Aarhus Festival had undergone a transformation in recent years, with focus coming off traditional high culture, and instead being placed on more modern values. In order to reflect this, a new logo was needed to replace the 2005 version, which now felt out-of-date. A further reason for the logo update was the fact that the spelling of Aarhus had changed from using the Danish ‘Å’ to using ‘Aa’ – which is the original spelling of the city’s name - to, it was claimed, help the international profile of the city. The visual identity competition was announced on November 11th 2011 with the deadline just a month later.
Kasper Laigaard, a graphic design intern at Designit Aarhus, saw the competition and thought he’d give it a go. Kasper says, “I had some spare time, so why the hell not! The assignment was to create a logo/identity and visualise it on various platforms such as web, app, printed matters and merchandise. It was harder than first anticipated because it had to target a wide age group, so it had to be something young and older people could relate to. I started off by sketching in hand a custom typography and after two days’ work I could see it wasn’t going to work so I started over again. I spent so long trying to find the right colours, even changing them yet again just a few days before the deadline. I had to get some inspiration, so an old magazine of mine got me thinking on some graphics from 1930 Bauhaus, and I started on sketching some geometrics. These sketches became (after a few iterations) the final logo and some design elements.”
We’re really proud of Kasper and his work. We obviously need to give him more to do…
