ortigiamusic.com

Made in 68 days
Siracusa, Italy

Usually electronic music festivals are some huge hangar or field far outside the city, where you need to drive an hour by car. But take that same electronic music and drop it onto a small island where the Greeks built temples 30 centuries ago, where the Mediterranean laps against limestone that witnessed the rise and fall of empires, and suddenly the absurd becomes sublime. Ortigia Music 2025 is a festival in the middle of the historical part of Siracusa — Ortigia.
The festival organisers and creative director Rosalie De Meyer presented us with a confusing, yet delicious contradiction: to create an identity that would clearly and understandably present both such a historical city as Siracusa, and introduce and "marry" the best DJs of Europe with this history and heritage.

In the 8th century BC, Corinthian colonists landed here and named it Ortigia — "quail island". Archimedes was born here and designed the war machines that held off Roman legions for three years. The Byzantines fortified what the Romans had conquered. In 878 AD, the Arabs transformed the island into a jewel of Islamic architecture and learning. After 1085 the Normans were building their own monuments atop Arab foundations. Then came the Spanish in 1504, who spent three centuries on Sicily before 1860 when it was liberated from Bourbon rule and incorporated into the newly unified Kingdom of Italy.
By the time electronic music producers arrived in 2025, Ortigia had survived Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, earthquakes, Allied bombing raids, and decades of mass tourism.
From these centuries of history came our fundamental design problem: how do we create festival graphics that don’t look like cultural vandalism? Electronic music festivals speak in vibrant neon screams and futuristic fonts. Festival-goers wear clothing that glows in the dark and hurts your retinas in daylight.

The second and final version of the identity focused on combining the island landscape itself with the festival and electronic music. They should communicate with each other and respond to each other, being in the same format, be it an Instagram story, a navigation sign, or an advertising banner.
Unfortunately the second version of the identity, due to the lack of sufficient time to develop another full-fledged concept and branding strategy, had to be tied more to the decoration and purification of communication than to inventing a completely new language [we had 2 months before the start of the festival, and it still needed to be promoted].
Ortigia — an island in the Mediterranean Sea, connected by bridges to the main part of Siracusa and, accordingly, Sicily. This means that you can work with free form, stylisation, transformation of phenomena, and memorable moments into vector forms for communication. The main points, naturally, were related to the sea, the beach, the waves, the sand, and everything that surrounds it.

The psychology of colour in festival design is usually based on the idea that brighter is better, richer is more interesting, and that anything worth seeing should be visible from space. This approach works well for festivals held in industrial areas or purpose-built venues, but strictly speaking, it is cultural vandalism in the case of a historically significant site.
Our starting point was the natural palette of Ortigia: the warm limestone of which most of the island’s buildings are built, the deep blue of the sea, the silvery green of the olive trees, the terracotta of traditional ceramics, the greys, greens, and blues of the stone beaches. Our challenge was to transfer them to a contemporary festival context without losing their meaning, history, and character.

We developed what we called a "sound spectrum" — a colour system that moved from the warm tones of the stone to slightly cooler shades of blue, with accent colours taken from traditional Sicilian ceramics and textiles. The palette was subdued enough to blend with Italian architecture during the day, yet vibrant enough to suit the visual demands of electronic music culture.

We had to keep last year’s logo due to the legalisation of the festival itself but it is abstract enough and can work in different moods. Simple enough to work on a fabric wristband, elegant enough to be recognised when carved into stone [which we might actually do for future permanent signage].

We took our own arka Sans font and adapted its forms to the tasks that this particular project required of us. The font should be interesting, so that you would want to look at it; it should be adapted to many tasks and medias: from small Instagram signs to banners where the inscriptions will be half a meter high. And it has to be perfectly made on a technical level, so that the thickness of the characters, proportions, and kerning are accurate
We edited most of the glyphs so that the mood of the font was more "fluid" and rhythmic. The glyphs -BCDGJOQSU- became vertically asymmetrical, so that their bottom is wider than the top, because of this they hold on to the baseline more clearly. And we also changed the rounded forms of the glyphs -CDGOQS- by 8%, now they look more like a drop of water, even if it is not visible in the text.

Social media for music festivals is typically a fire hose of content — artist announcements, lineup reveals, behind-the-scenes footage, and an endless stream of "ARE YOU READY FOR THIS?" posts. For the Ortigia Music Festival, we needed a digital presence that could cut through the noise of other festivals while honouring both the electronic music scene and the historical setting.
The main focus was on the font and the main information [and usually secondary] inscriptions, be it an artist, a location name, or a schedule. This helped to clearly communicate the main information of the festival in the tight deadlines we had to work in. Hand-drawn background textures as support for the main identity were used only as support for the media and never as the primary graphics. This helped to create a multi-layered graphic even in cases where the texture almost merges with the background.

Stories are a much faster format, even compared to short videos on TikTok and Reels on Instagram. In this regard, they must be understandable and visually clean, but at the same time bright and catchy, so that a person wants to stop and look at each individual story. We made dozens of hand-drawn letterings "Sold Out!", "90% Sold Out!", "10% Left!", "20% Left!", "HALF LEFT", etc. to highlight the most important information. In essence, we make people stop, forcibly tear them out of the usual rhythm of scrolling stories and make them look closely at the graphics, read the text, and understand what is written in the lettering.

Italian summers are not as pleasant as you may think. The heat doesn’t just warm you up, it changes. Colours change. Materials behave differently. Human patience works differently. Any visual identity designed for a Mediterranean summer festival needs to take these environmental factors into account.
We tested physical materials in conditions that simulate summer. Fabric dyes, printed graphics, fabrics, LEDs, etc. were tested for colour burn and fastness under intense sunlight, for adhesion, for stability in high temperatures. For us this wasn’t just a technical test, it was cultural respect.
The design system was designed with the understanding that it actually improves in harsh summer conditions. Warm colours became more vibrant under the bright sun. The dark blue background of the street signs created a stronger contrast against the bright white walls of the houses in the sun. The contrast of colours, typography, and backgrounds, which can seem harsh in northern Europe, provided the necessary readability in the bright Sicilian summer sun.