Guimarães Jazz 2021

This program was created for the 30th edition of the Guimarães Jazz Festival, held at Centro Cultural Vila Flor in Guimarães, Portugal. The program was specially designed to commemorate three decades of the festival’s existence. The number 30 was cleverly incorporated into a cylindrical shape, drawing inspiration from typographic cylinders used in newspaper printing presses. This design choice aimed to evoke a sense of time passing and establish an analogy with a festival that has become an esteemed institution within the European jazz scene.

Jazz concerts inherently carry an element of risk, as they are live performances with improvisation, embracing the unknown. It is precisely this spontaneous and activist aspect of jazz that led us to adopt a tabloid format for the program. By doing so, we aimed to convey the notion that what jazz communicates is news meant to be heard by the entire world. Typography-wise, our intention was to strike a harmonious balance between the conventional elements found in newspapers and the expressive language unique to jazz. All of this was achieved using a palette consisting of only two colors.

Designed at Studio Dobra in 2021. In 2022 the program was awarded with a Red Dot in Communication Design.