The identity for Spatial festival feels aptly three-dimensional

Berlin’s infamous concert venue and former broadcasting station, Funkhaus, has had a rich history of events and performances. In 2025, it hosted Spatial, an immersive, spatial sound festival that allows attendees to explore experimental sonic spaces, marking an even more avant garde turn for the Berlin location. The festival, which returned for its second run, took over five of Funkhaus’ rooms, where each environment was designed for a unique set of interactions with sounds coming from the walls, floors, columns and ceilings.

With the Spatial festival being both an unusual and experimental experience, the programme was in need of an identity that could reflect its alternative offering, whilst distilling it down to something that wasn’t intimidating or complex. To do so, Spatial turned to Barcelona-based design studio SMLXL and long-term collaborator Gerard Mallandrich from motion design practice, Mallandrich. The result of this collaboration is a visual identity that’s exciting, kinetic and as unexpected as the festival itself.

Working in tandem from the get-go, this collaborative setup was crucial to the project, with Gerard’s motion playing an integral role in Spatial’s brand and the festival’s supporting campaign. “From the outset, we envisioned pushing for an identity that would be experiential and strongly driven by movement,” Anna Berbiela, partner and creative director at SMLXL says, “rather than adding motion as a final layer to an already defined system, we wanted motion thinking to be part of the foundation.”

This meant that motion could be a dynamic voice within the identity, embodying the physical transitions between environments, sounds and imagined spaces that make the festival experience what it is. It also brought a much needed energy to the brand. After all, the experience is for people – living, moving, listening – and anything too static or sterile wouldn’t have felt fit. As a result, the brand felt alive and could truly exist as a three-dimensional experience. “The real challenge wasn’t just adding dimension,” Anna shares, “but creating a sense that you could actually enter and move through the content.”

Seemingly with a life and character of its own, the identity and campaign is reactive, responding to digital and physical space through an augmented sonic landscape. This started with SMLXL and Mallandrich making 3D scans of Funkhaus’ rooms – which they found to be too busy – before exploring a virtual space designed by them. “We drew inspiration from cinematic techniques, almost like Star Wars opening credits,” Anna says, “using exaggerated vanishing points to explore spatial depth,” in doing so, creating a liminal space that conceptually embodied the festival. “The visuals would become a space in themselves, something you move through rather than just look at.”

With this digital space as the brand’s base, SMLXL then tested the inclusion of imagery, type and colour to see how each would interact with one another and distort itself in the process. The studio opted to keep the typographic system of the brand clean and stripped back – taking the form of monochromatically-applied Neue Haas Grotesk – allowing motion to take centre stage. “The identity and character would come through the point of view and movement,” Anna says, “it felt unnecessary to add anything else,” especially with such an experimental and characterful use of angles and orientation. When combined, the typographic application upon Spatial’s augmented space could be framed for static applications, making sure everything was practically legible while equally reflecting the rhythm of the event. 

While the brand is an exploration of space it also directly responds to the different applications it occupies – be it the uber-interactive structure of Spatial’s website or the physical projections used in the IRL event space. As a result, attendees and artists felt connected with the identity, as if it too was a living, breathing figure at the event. “Given its unique quality and use of immersive technologies, people have been very positive to get to learn a bit more on how we came up with this,” Anna ends, “hopefully there will be another edition soon, and if that comes, it will be a fun challenge to rethink and push the envelope even further.”