A passer-by photographing the yellow World of Wonders citylight poster on a Kaliningrad street.
← Ekaterina Lopushenko Film festival identity

World of Wonders

A film festival for teenagers, designed to survive the one test that matters: would they photograph it?

Client
World of Wonders Film Festival
Year
2023
Place
Kaliningrad region, Russia
Role
Identity, art direction, all carriers

The brief

The first international children's and youth film festival in Kaliningrad — a first edition, with nothing behind it and no audience that had ever been to one.

The core audience is 12 to 17: an age group that ignores anything visibly made for them by adults. The festival ran across four towns of the Kaliningrad region — Kaliningrad, Zelenogradsk, Svetlogorsk and Pionersky — so whatever went up on the street had to hold its own in four different places at once, against every other poster competing for the same glance. And it had to be worth pointing a phone at. Everything else — the badge, the ticket, the tote — followed from that.

The idea

A card inside a card

Every surface is a saturated field with a lighter panel floated on top of it — the shape of a photo, a screen, a sticker. The contents change constantly; the silhouette stays recognisable from across the street.

It is a deliberately cheap idea, in the best sense: it survives bad printing, bad weather and a phone camera held at an angle, and it can be rebuilt by anyone on the festival team without breaking.

Two A2 festival posters, one lemon and one pink, each with a cream panel carrying the programme lines and a flat illustrated character below.
Programme posters. The ground colour changes, the construction does not — which is what makes a first-edition festival look like it has been around for years.
Three vertical festival banners hanging side by side on a glass facade — one lemon, two pink — each with a different illustrated character and the same programme lines.
Three banners, one construction. Seen together on a facade, the variation is what registers first and the system is what holds it together.

The audience was 12 to 17. The brief was really: don't look like it was made by adults.

Palette

Two acids and a paper

Lemon and pink carry the loud surfaces, sky blue separates the accreditation tiers, and a warm off-white stands in for paper on every panel. Black does the rest. Five values, sampled here from the printed artwork.

The system

From a six-metre banner to a fifty-millimetre ticket

A kaleidoscope rosette works as the mark. A cast of flat characters carries the mood without illustrating any particular film in the programme, which matters for a festival whose line-up is confirmed late.

I commissioned that cast from Lyuba Berezina and briefed it as a population rather than a set of pictures: one flat weight, no outlines, no faces specific enough to belong to a particular film, and enough of them that the festival team could keep recombining figures after I was gone. Directing an illustrator on a first-edition festival is mostly deciding what not to let the drawings do.

The construction scales without being redrawn: the same relationship of ground, panel and figure holds at every size, so the ticket, the badge and the street banner are visibly the same object at different magnifications.

Two perforated cinema tickets, pink and lemon, each with a flat illustrated character and the screening title.
Tickets — one per screening, printed in the two festival grounds.
Two lanyard badges, pink for participants and sky blue for jury, each with an illustrated character and the festival dates.
Accreditation. Colour does the sorting before anyone reads the word.
Festival stationery: letterhead, business card, and a pink notebook with an illustrated flower character.
Stationery and internal documents — the quiet end of the system, where the rosette does the work alone.
Three white festival T-shirts, each printed with a different illustrated character.
Crew and volunteer shirts, three characters.
A white festival bum bag printed with the wordmark and a skateboarding character, worn over a denim jacket.
Merchandise aimed squarely at the audience, not at the sponsors.

In the city

Where it actually had to work

The street is where a festival identity stops being a proposal. Four towns got banners strung over the road, citylights at the bus shelters, posters in shop windows, and a press wall the audience used as a backdrop all week.

A festival banner strung across a street between buildings, above traffic and a theatre sign.
Banner over the street. At this distance only three things can be read, so only three things are set large.
A backlit citylight poster at a bus shelter, listing the four towns hosting the festival.
Citylight at a bus shelter — the panel carries the four host towns.
The same citylight format on a shopping street at dusk, lit from within.
The same format after dark, where the lemon does most of the work.
A woman walking a small dog past a shop doorway with the festival poster displayed inside the glass.
Shop windows across the four towns. Posters were placed by the venues themselves, so the format had to survive being taped up by anyone.
Five teenage festival attendees standing in front of the World of Wonders press wall, each holding a printed festival tote bag.
Opening day, June 2023 — festival totes in the hands of the audience they were drawn for.

More work