DIA’s identity for an electronic festival mimics music with a typeface made of pulsating particles

Nuits Sonores’ is an electronic music festival that takes place annually in Lyon, France, and this year it’s grainy, neon green new look came from the minds at design agency DIA studio. Backed by the organisation Arty Farty, each year Nuits Sonores scours the creative landscape for a new design agency to take on the open brief for the festival. The event takes over Lyon over one weekend, bringing the eclectic electronics to one cultural hub. “It’s wild to see Lyon, which is a pretty traditional French city transformed like this,” says Mitch Paone, partner and creative director at DIA.

When executing the project collaboration was key for DIA, and the team worked with Brazilian creative technologist André Burnier to bring a generative motion tool to life to be used throughout the identity. Mitch says: “We designed the tool to allow us to generate both extremely high-resolution stills and motion in different aspect ratios for easy implementation.” The execution is spatially expressive; the motion design is fluid and rippling, moving like sound waves liquified across the screen. Mitch continues: “We’re recreating the pulse of music and rhythm through typography and particles, almost as if you could see the sound emanating from the speakers, but in this case, particles are blasting out the type.” It brings out the identities industrial feel, something Mitch describes as a “techno meets punk vibe”.

This is paired with custom typeface MNKY Klaus from MNKY Type, where Mitch is also a partner and type designer. Through the visual world of Nuits Sonores, this neutral typeface becomes an anchor grounding the chaos, like a visual metronome tying the identity to one beat. The design system considers adaptation to all aspects of the festival’s assets, across its website, social, signage, posters, merch and more. Going even further, the agency also supplied Arty Farty with a custom tool to facilitate versatility beyond the project’s end.

What stood-out for Mitch across the whole project was the balance between expression and functionality. The neon-green accents of the identity coincidentally became a big part of the wider experience, where “attendees wore the colour, dyed their hair, brought glow sticks, and so on, inadvertently making the community a participant in the identity itself, which was fun to witness,” says Mitch. Looking forward, this collaboration with creative communities is something DIA is set to dive into further. Soon, it will be launching a curatorial and cultural platform and further into the future it has plans to begin an annual release of wine-bottles designed by artists DIA admire.