Sundance Film Festival 2025
Identity
The annual Sundance Film Festival is one of the largest and most prestigious independent film festivals in the United States, with a forty-year history. We were hired to develop a brand identity for its 2025 edition.
The task was to create a visual language unique to the Sundance Film Festival 2025, building on the perennial identity system introduced in 2023. Notably, such an international art institution as Sundance is based in a small community in Park City, Utah, known for its striking geological features and natural landscape. To highlight the location, we created a set of custom glyphs using the characters of Monument Grotesk Mono – one of the typefaces included in the Festival’s perennial identity – by adding underlines shaped like landscape elements: clouds, mountains, buildings, and lakes. Any text set in these glyphs, dubbed Sundanscape, would naturally evoke the Festival’s environment. The playful, cartoon-like shapes and quirky textures also add a sense of childlike innocence, reflecting the institution’s youthful curiosity in independent films.
The Sundanscape glyphs were often layered with amorphous graphic textures. These elements aimed to extend the themes of place and context, featuring details from scenery seen in past Sundance-winning films: a small piece of the view through the office window behind Dan Hedaya in Blood Simple (1984) by the Coen Brothers, or part of the vast icy waters shown in Frozen River (2008) by Courtney Hunt. The details were enlarged and stylized, sometimes resembling Utah’s distinctive landforms.
A broad color palette was required to support various applications that needed to stand out on the snowy streets of Park City in January. We created four bright primary colors inspired by the perennial system, and softer secondary pastel tones that evoke anticipation for spring. When layered, these colors blend to create a new spectrum of tertiary shades, enriching the overall palette.
The Sundance Institute Creative Team excellently executed the system we developed. Overall, this project showcases an interesting collaboration between a small local graphic design practice and an internationally oriented organization across an ocean and multiple time zones – a partnership in which the designers’ personal approaches met the complex demands of a risk-taking client, producing an outcome that surprised both sides.
- Project type:
- identity
- letterform
- Typeset in:
- Monument Grotesk
- Monument Grotesk Mono
- Commissioned by:
- Sundance Institute
- Merchandise designed by:
- Sundance Institute Creative Team
