Studio Lowrie’s Sundance Film Festival identity proves small studios can take on projects of any scale

Sometimes, things just all fall into place. So much so, that you can’t quite believe your own luck.

That was certainly the case for London-based Studio Lowrie when it received an email, claiming to be from someone at Sundance. Mike White, the studio’s founder and creative director, and design director Callin Mackintosh had finished work for the day, when Callin saw the notification pop up. Assuming it was fake, he checked the sender and lo and behold, it really was from Luis Farfán, the world-renowned institution’s creative director.

“I was texting Mike at 8 PM or whatever it was, asking if he’d seen the email and was getting no reply. Annoyingly, Mike always switches off his read receipts in WhatsApp, so I had no idea if he’d seen it,” Callin recalls. Frustrated and eager to discuss the email, he called Mike – who was in Liverpool Street station at the time – who instantly hung up and read Luis’ request.

It read: “I’m a big fan of your work. We wanted to know if you would be interested in possibly partnering with us on the branding for next year’s Sundance Film Festival…”

With the authenticity ascertained, the duo realised it was time to knuckle down and deliver a pitch that Sundance couldn’t turn down. Mike and Callin were asked to come up with three different routes and, if they won, their designs would be plastered all over Park City, where Sundance Film Festival takes place each year. The festival is attended by over 50,000 people – a mixture of industry juggernauts and your average movie buffs – so for two guys whose studio is based in a shipping container in east London, the pressure was on.

These respective backgrounds clearly combine in Lowrie’s identity for Sundance Film Festival 2020, which took place in January of this year. It’s typographically led, bold and incredibly distinctive, bearing all the hallmarks of the pair’s industry experience. “It was an incredible project for us and was a year in the making,” Mike explains, expressing a sentiment that only becomes clearer throughout our interview: that this was something of a dream project for Studio Lowrie, and marks a real step for the studio, both in terms of the scope of the work, but also the kinds of clients it wants to work with.

When asked what kinds of projects Lowrie enjoys the most, for example, Mike continues, “Sundance was the exact definition of that. It’s a really interesting client doing unique things and which wants to challenge people’s perception of film and how they interpret it. But it also wants to work with people who it respects and loves to listen to, and trust. Sundance gave us the opportunity to push and do what we wanted to do. And that’s quite a rare thing.”

The next stage was to create a typographic lockup to go alongside this symbol and Lowrie opted for a sans serif typeface called La Nord, designed by Raoul Gottschling. “We designed this lockup to fit within the standard US movie poster size so it means that our actual logo lockup is a poster itself, we don’t need to add anything else to it,” Callin explains. From there, Lowrie created a supporting seven symbols to represent the diversity of the festival and a set of bold colours were selected to go alongside these. Symbols were combined in a series of tessellating and mesmerising animations, again referencing how the pupil reacts to light in a cinema screening.

In combining all of these elements in different combinations – one symbol could appear on one poster with a purple background, while another symbol could be on yellow – Lowrie created an instantly recognisable identity which avoids repetition and feels fresh at every touchpoint. This was a major reason why Luis opted to work with Lowrie after its pitch. “I wanted to create a visual language that was simple and flexible, a design system that would lend itself well to large scale Out of Home executions and the smallest of digital assets,” he tells us. “The thing that people sometimes don’t see is that developing the brand identity for our festival is more (much more) than a nice logo and colour scheme. It’s an entire brand system that has to work through digital, motion, print, and experiential executions. It’s not unlike developing the brand identity for the Olympics or World Cup... Except we do it every year, instead of every four.”

All of this thinking was compiled into a brand guidelines document (which is over 130 pages long, not even counting the separate document that exists for all of the sub-brands) which was then handed over to a team of eight designers working at Sundance. It’s one of the reasons this project actually felt manageable for Mike and Callin, as without this team to work with, the duo would have had to implement over 1,500 applications of the brand themselves. From cars to snowboards, bottles, puffer jackets, tote bags, scarves, posters, booklets, umbrellas, lanyards and T-shirts – you name it, there’s a version of it that exists with Sundance Film Festival 2020’s branding on it.

This way of working did, of course, present its own challenges, though, as Mike and Callin had to design these guidelines long before any of the films showing at this year’s festival were announced. “It’s very hard to test things out for the longest and shortest word length,” Callin explains. “It could end up being a documentary that’s got 40 words in its title – you just don't know.” Their workaround, therefore, was to ensure their designs were as flexible as possible, introducing a line into the design which in turn creates a simple grid. “So the idea was that it could just flex greatly,” Mike says.

A major facet of the project, but one which was introduced fairly late on in the process, is a series of animated trailers and a brand launch video, which bring the visual identity to life through motion graphics, soundtracked by Beach House. These trailers were to be played before every single film throughout the festival. For this part of the project, the pair worked with motion designer Connor Campbell who looked into ways of bringing movement and personality to the identity. Each trailer sees Connor taking elements from the identity and expanding upon them, breaking the repetitive nature of the identity in its static form. With a different colour palette for each, Connor’s animations adhere loosely to the styles of jazz, Italo, disco and rock – and Beach House responded to his work, creating a different soundtrack in each of these styles for each trailer too.