IDES 362 Digital Music Festival Typo-Graphic Notes From the Edge
Taught by Christina Lee Kim Koon and Elyssa Schmid, the Digital Music Festival project invites students to create and promote a bespoke music festival through a consistent design system that makes noise!
This year, the creative constraint was to use TYPE as the primary visual to communicate each student's festival. The project began with a typo/graphic exercise using a piece of music as the creative prompt. Students were tasked to build analogue type experiments, using only a photocopier and cut and paste techniques in order to push legibility to the point of abstraction, but still communicate the song.
After the warm-up, students began the to develop their festival identity systems, exploring how letterforms could be transformed into living, breathing festival energy, while building a flexible identity system they applied to an event poster, an AR experience and social media.
The resulting projects pushed the boundaries of type as image and as a powerful expressive vehicle that effectively captured the rhythm, emotion and tone of each student’s festival.
Shown above: Evelyn McCammon (IDEA Grad 2026)
