Type that swings, imagery that sings — a brand improvising into its eighth year of jazz.
Melb Int'l Jazz Fest
Campaign Identity
- Brand Strategy
- Brand Identity
- Campaign Development
- Creative Direction
- Digital & Print Design
- Event Signage
- 3D & Motion
Defining jazz, then redefining it
Eight years in, and still finding new notes.
2025 marks our 8th year partnering with the Melbourne International Jazz Festival — a relationship built on a shared belief that the festival’s communications should feel as alive, considered and forward-leaning as the music itself.
Each year we return to the same question: what should jazz look like now? And each year the answer pushes a little further. New typographic ideas, new visual languages, new ways of translating sound, performance and atmosphere into something you can see, share and step inside. The festival evolves, the audience evolves, and the work evolves with them.
A dancing typography system
Jazz is built on improvisation — but improvisation only works when there’s something to push against. The stave, the time signature, the key. Structure is what gives the soloist somewhere to go.
We took that tension as our starting point. The MIJF typographic system is built like a sheet of music: a fixed five-line stave runs through every layout, holding the composition with the same quiet discipline as a score. It’s the framework the type plays against.
Within it, the typography performs. Letters lift off the baseline, slide between the lines, stretch across bars and pause on the rest. Words swing, syncopate and improvise — never random, always in time. The stave keeps the rhythm; the typography brings the solo.
Touch, smell, sound, sight
Jazz isn’t just sound — it’s the room, the lights, the brass, the hush before the first note. We wanted the imagery to hold all of it.
The visual language (built by 3D2D) pairs polished metallics with deep, luxe velvets — two materials in conversation. The metallics nod to the instruments themselves: the gleam of a saxophone bell, the brushed shine of a cymbal, the warm reflection of a trumpet under stage light. The velvets carry the room: theatre curtains, upholstered booths, the soft acoustics of a venue settling in before the show.
Together they capture the full experience of jazz — the performance and the place, the instrument and the audience, the spark and the setting. Imagery you can almost hear, and almost reach out and touch.
