Studio Ingrid Picanyol’s Rising Seas campaign uses experimental print processes as an urgent CTA

Ingrid Picanyol's Barcelona-based design studio have issued a call for urgent climate action in their challenging Rising Seas campaign for Torelló Mountain Film Festival. As well as a series of unsurprising statistics from the UN Climate Conference, the campaign is inspired by the fact that, as of 2021’s festival, the Antarctic’s ice thaw has reached Torelló’s borders. This call to action has been graphically achieved through Ingrid Picanyol Studio’s speculative, conceptual approach to the subject matter. Asking how one could visually represent the unexpected arrival of something that shouldn’t be there, and questioning what the festival would look like if it were suddenly affected by such an influx of water.

Due to the physical nature of both the issue and the festival itself, the resulting identity is fundamentally tactile, driven by Picanyol’s experimental approach to printing techniques in collaboration with Gràfiques Copyset. Working together to experiment with the physical effect of introducing water to the printing process, the offset printers were directly injected with streams of water; in turn disrupting the flow of the festival’s bright orange hue and creating anomalous, one-of-a-kind prints.

Highlighting the subject matter in a literal sense, the result walks the line between abstractly expressive and technically worrisome; finding its own thought-provoking middle ground between the two. Ingrid Picanyol Studio’s digital interpretation of this goes one step further, with the virtual type distorting and reacting in a way akin to the electrical short-circuiting of a computer introduced to water.

Looking for typefaces to provide a pragmatic counterpart to the campaign’s experimental processes to react against, Ingrid Picanyol Studio turned to Pangram Pangram’s Formula Condensed and Colophon Foundry’s Basis Grotesque as their dynamic duo. “After the first print run went wrong by the influence of water, we needed a secondary typeface (Basis Grotesque Regular),” Ingrid Picanyol tells us, “that could rescue the institutional information without covering the unexpected printing errors,” utilising the imperfection and disarray as an emotive device.

Ingrid Picanyol Studio also introduced orange as the campaign’s primary colour in an attempt to further address and emphasise the importance and pressing nature of the issue. “All the formal elements of the campaign started on the urge to send an urgent message to the audience,” Picanyol remarks, finding inspiration across the world of protest and warning signs. “Here bold messages stand up for a need, an urge and a point,” she explains, “and we thought the festival could embrace that position as well,” Picanyol concludes, championing this tenacity through the prominent use of Formula Condensed’s striking and solid construction.

Ingrid Picanyol Studio