Caminhos Film Festival
The many ways of Portuguese Cinema through a dynamic identity and a custom designed typeface.
↳ Client:
Centro de Estudos Cinematográficos,
Coimbra, Portugal 🇵🇹
↯ Sector:
Arts & Culture
— Scope of work:
Brand identity
Identity application
Campaign
Typeface design
For more than two decades, Caminhos makes Coimbra the capital of portuguese cinema every year. For its 19th edition, there was a need and desire to expand the number and the diversity of submitted films. Therefore, a fresh visual identity was developed in line with the many ways — in portuguese, caminhos — the festival brings to play. The campaign successfully increased the festival audience numbers, offering a rich and diverse cultural program relevant to various areas of the arts and film.
The visual identity is dynamic across all its use. The constant use of one same typography but with different content (like invitation, program, schedule, press, guest, or anything that needed to be written), makes for an expressive language committed to the festival various media.
The concept of Caminhos — ways — achieves its dynamic identity through a number of arrows that go with the overall geometry of the custom typography. So the concept of Cinema, and diversity, is represented with a selection of five different common aspect ratios in film: 3:2, 4:3, 16:9, 2.40:1 and 5:3. From the many formats analyzed, these five stood out from the group as the best mixture of proportions.
Since proportions, i.e. the ratio between width and height, are the major differentiator and key identifier of each aspect ratio, some were flipped and scaled to boost apart even more that set of selected formats.
Every same letter exists in five different aspects ratios, that define the boundaries in which each letter of the alphabet is geometrically drawn. Those five styles make the full bespoke typeface developed for this project: Caminhos Format. The orthogonal geometric principles were perfect to fit in each glyph, echoing Architype by Theo Van Doesburg. The goal was to conceive a language capable of being dynamic and true to the festival's ambitions.
The different styles were engineered on a increment that doubled on each iteration, so that the next style's height has twice the distance value of the previous style.
