Music, creativity and technology festival Sónar+D asked us to redesign its website in order to create an online presence in keeping with the vibrant content of the festival.

From the beginning, we knew that any design decision would have to be conditioned by two key items: First, we needed to respect Sónar’s excellent visual and graphical legacy—not for nothing is the festival known for its unique visual personality, combining artistic experimentation with the most rigorous graphical and typographical standards. Second, we needed to create a modular navigational structure that allowed for considerable flexibility in content while still yielding compositional stress.

Resources such as images framed in white, Helvetica in generous sizes and square structuring are used to differentiate the contents, all the while fostering the special visual character that the festival has always had. One of the challenges was the side-by-side presence of the festival imagery produced by the creative team and the audiovisual content from the speakers. Our solution was a retractable header that leads to the key items, giving each of these areas its own distinct space.

These design decisions were always made from the perspective of validating and enhancing the high quality of the contents, these being a mere conduit for the personality of Sónar+D.
Integrating with the internal Sónar+D team proved indispensible for the project, as was Mortensen’s invaluable collaboration with programming tasks.