A physical version of Photoshop layers for by:Larm festival identity

Each year, illustrator Frode Skaren and graphic designer Rune Mortensen devise a fun new identity for this Oslo music festival. For this year, interchangeable wood-cut boards create a physical version of a digital image file

By:Larm is the largest music showcase festival for new and up-and-coming bands in Scandinavia. Every February/March, it runs for four days in central Oslo.

For this year’s visual identity for the festival, Skaren and Mortensen created “a framework as a tool for visual experiments, where wood-cut boards works as layers with optional variations. Think of it as physical Photoshop layers,” they say.

Simply by sliding the boards in and out and photographing the result, a huge number of different combinations can be created to use across the collateral for the festival.

“The design changes alongside the festival, with images of the framework with few or no boards to a more complex composition with many boards in endless variations,” they say.

“The idea is to have a design that can work for a longer term, without feeling outdated or mundane.”

 

 

CR has reported before on Skaren and Mortensen’s work for by:Larm. In 2013, the pair made a wooden sculpture with a block for each artist appearing that year. As more bands were added to the bill, more blocks were added to the sculpture.

While we liked a poster for the 2011 festival so much, we asked Skaren and Mortensen to adapt it for the cover of our 2012 Music issue.

Read our profile on Skaren here