Before Ross Chandler became a graphic designer he was an event producer, setting up underground raves in BC and beyond, networking with the global 90s house and electronic dance scene. It’s no surprise that the founder of Becoming Design Office wanted to try his hand at designing the identity for a festival, and Design Victoria might be the first of many. Ross spoke to Design Victoria about the evolution of the festival’s identity and the team-thinking that inspired the ambitious, playful concept. 

How did you approach designing a new brand identity for Design Victoria? 

As a studio, Becoming leans on typography to tell the greater story. It can be really obvious or it can be really subtle. For this design savvy audience we came up with the idea to create a brand new typeface that spoke to the range of diversity of everybody that gets involved with the festival.

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We created a typeface with multiple versions of every single character in the alphabet. The range of characters represents the design landscape in the city, and became a really powerful design tool for us when we built out the brand. It allows us to tell lots of different stories and to create a compelling visual element by animating  the logo to show the constant change of design.

How does the new brand build on what people already recognize about Design Victoria? 

We wanted to introduce a brand that really felt very fresh and progressive and ownable by the Design Victoria festival, but that didn't feel like it was coming out of left field after the last two years. In addition to the gradients, we wanted to preserve the colour scheme—both familiar elements to the Design Victoria audience—from the first couple years. We created our ‘Becoming’ version of the gradient and brought in some more purposeful shapes based on the typeface. So, while we modified it, it's still in the realm of what was used previously.

What does the new identity mean for the next few years? 

A big part of creating any kind of brand, especially a brand for a design festival, is to establish a relationship with the audience and to build recognition year on year. We've really strived to create an identity that would serve two purposes: to create a recognizable visual element in this logo and the associated brand graphic. By playing with type and letters, we've created a system that can constantly renew, change and be seen and utilised in different ways for years. We're not just using the letters, we're also using sections of the letters that are no longer letters, they're now these structural components that speak to an architect or an engineer… 

Moving into next year, we have a huge library of graphics to work with that will help us create a new look based on the same system. So we may modify the colour system or use different combinations of letters from this infinitely repeatable system.

How did you come up with the typeface?

We're a small studio and we work very collaboratively. Joe came up with the idea of creating this typeface that had a very sci-fi, futuristic look. Being the oldest person in the office, when I looked at the typeface that was presented, it drew all kinds of emotions and memories of things that were going on in the 1980s. But through the lens of a Gen Z or a Millennial designer, it has a completely different context. We got into this dialog about context and what the desired outcome of that design decision was, which resulted in the idea of creating a variable typeface that would be able to tell the greater story and appeal to different people's perspectives of design.