The 2022 Imaginairium Festival by Wordfest was a literary series of events running from September 29-October 8 in downtown Calgary. Our goal was to create a memorable and inviting environment for authors, hosts, and attendees since it’s their first in-person festival in years.
All 2022 Imaginairium Portrait Illustrations
Over the summer, I got to work with the Creative Director to brand and design the Imaginairum. We expanded on their dots theme and tried to incorporate different aspects of dots onto the stages and in our venues. I began with some 3D model installations to concept ideas before we developed them further into small wooden tokens that were laser cut, engraved, and hand-painted.
MPL Vinyl Wallpaper
Hotel Arts Wallpaper
Spirited Conversation with Ruth Ware
T-shirt, Tote, and Badges
Question Everything Event; Photo by: David Kotsibie
With the existing branding of our literary events being clean yet modern, I wanted to create a style for the author portraits to better match this year’s theme. It was almost a 3-month journey illustrating the authors and hosts in these simple line art through traditional brush pens, scanning them, and vectorizing each one. I created my own handwriting in a font to match the illustration as a festival font. In the end, by vectorizing them I got a clean appearance that harmonized the branding further.
Photo by: David Kotsibie
Nenshi on Stage; Photo by: David Kotsibie
Poet Laureate Photo by: David Kotsibie
These illustrations were used on the backs of printed schedules, for advertisement and website graphics, vinyl wallpapers at venues, t-shirts, tote bags, and tokens. The tokens were engraved for the authors and hosts to give to an attendee they connected with throughout the week as souvenirs for a memorable week of literary events.
Imaginairium Style Guide
