Halcyon

A festival with no money for photography and a different line-up every year needed an identity that could survive both. The answer was a rule rather than a look.

One rule

Every poster is built from a circle, a rectangle and a set of parallel lines, at any scale, in black on white. Nothing else is permitted — no photographs, no third shape, no second colour.

Constraints this tight are usually a phase you grow out of. This one held for three years and got more interesting as it went, because the only way to make the fourth poster different from the third was to be cleverer with the same parts.

Why no photographs

Partly budget. Mostly that a festival poster with a performer on it is out of date the moment the line-up changes, and this festival announced late every single year. An abstract poster can go to print in February for an event whose programme is not confirmed until May.

Where it went

Posters, the programme, and eventually the site signage, which used the same three shapes at building scale — the one application where the rule genuinely strained, and the one that people photographed most.