Lisb-ON Jardim Sonoro launched in 2014 in Portugal’s capital as a three-day celebration of some of the world’s best electronic music. Taking place towards the end of the summer, the festival has traditionally been held in the city’s historic Eduardo VII Park.

2022 marks a turning point for the event, with the organisers announcing both a name change (it is now just Jardim Sonoro) and a change of venue. Newly situated in Monsanto Park – a forest park that has been dubbed the lungs of Lisbon – Jardim Sonoro has never been so immersed in nature, and as such, the branding for this year’s instalment of the festival needed to be suitably green.

Tasked with handling the visuals, the team at Dentsu Creative Portugal, who have been working on the event since its inception, began imagining how the branding could reflect the festival’s new setting – the only problem was, no one was sure how to create a design that was even greener than before. So the team turned to Midjourney, an advanced visual AI platform, to see what it could come up with.

“Having witnessed and been part of the magical previous editions, it became humanly impossible for us to imagine how it could become even greater, with so many planned changes, and what would come of this even deeper fusion with nature that has always been part of Jardim Sonoro’s identity,” explains Gil Correia, creative director at Dentsu.

Responding to keywords input by the team, Midjourney was able to merge the facial features of some of the festival’s leading performers with symbols of nature such as birds, butterflies, leaves and trees, creating 12 unexpected and unique images.

These were then fine-tuned by the designers, who refined the compositions and added extra noise to the blurs and colour layers to create cohesion between the images. The result is a selection of posters that quite literally blend the festival with its surroundings in a way that is both surreal and strangely beautiful.

Speaking on their use of AI, and the wider conversation around its role in the creative industries, Ivo Purvis, creative director at Dentsu says: “The relevance of using this type of technology and the way we put our thinking and human side into the idea can create the most interesting synergies, without letting our role be replaced.

We are facing this issue with curiosity and enthusiasm for what is to come and are trying not to take a dramatic and fatalistic view, as if it was an enemy in front of us.”

Credits:
Agency: Dentsu Creative Portugal
CCO: Lourenço Thomaz
CD: Gil Correia
Art director: Gil Correia, Ivo Purvis
AI prompt master: Fred Van Zeller
Copywriter: João Moura
Designer: Emanuel Serôdio, Tiago Rodrigues
Motion graphics: Fábio Cunha, Miguel Reis