Lyric music video created for Tim Burgess and the O Genesis label for the first track of his album ‘Same Language, Different Worlds’ with Peter Gordon.
An homage to two cultures, the video has both Japanese and English lyrics in a reverse scroll down the screen, along with stylised tetris piece outlines falling in the background and a blocky waveform pattern reacting to the audio input.
Clips from the video were broadcast live on Channel 4 during the show Sunday Brunch in September 2016.
As part of my role as director of the Liverpool-based events company Rebel Soul, I designed a number of gig posters as well as overseeing the company’s overall branding & merchandise ‘look’ and the occasional video.
The logo itself was derived from a piece of artwork by our good friend, sound wizard and musician Adam Hanley, framed inside a reuleaux triangle similar in shape to a plectrum. The bespoke wordmark is fluid and flowing, evoking the rounded fonts commonly used in vinyl and record culture.
Each event we put on had a very distinct vibe, ranging from the acoustic sanctum of a Scandinavian seafarers church, to an open-air carnival of all things Jamaican. Several of the events became distinct entities in their own right – Positive Vibration and The Voodoo Ball for example.
From the fifth Threshold Festival onwards, I oversaw the creation of a new aesthetic every year bar one until the tenth and final edition in 2021, designing logos, posters, merchandise, artwork and more.
The 2015 event used the theme ‘Contrasting Geometries’ which was embraced at every level, from designing a bespoke typeface, to geometry-inspired ‘Threshyheads’ (above) and even the decision to use the roman numeral V instead of 5.
As lead designer for Threshold Festival’s ‘contrasting geometries’ theme in 2015, I worked on a typeface design that would be able to bring all the branding together, regardless of colour, shape or style.
Inspired heavily by the work of early 20th-century artist and designer Cassandre, I created a font similar in approach to his highly geometric type Bifur (1929), but with more of an emphasis on clarity and flexibility. Ultimately, three versions of ‘Vixur’ were designed, A & B as complimentary styles which could be overlaid to create the iconic two-tone effect Bifur pioneered, and C, a more legible version of Vixur A that can be used as a stand-alone font – for ease of use and convenience.
Vixur was used throughout Threshold 2015’s branding, in the logo design, poster designs, branding, merchandise & printed media. The font was adapted into several distinct styles over the course of the marketing campaign, including various offset & patterned versions of A+B for different aspects of the festival, notably for the visual arts branding as well as partner posters.
An article about Vixur appeared on the FACT website to tie in with their Type Motion exhibition, although sadly it has since been taken down.
