About Typomania Festival

Typomania is an annual festival of typographic design. For its 2021 edition — the festival ran in early 2021, with the identity designed in 2020 — Wave built the identity, and the year’s theme was impossible to sidestep: the pandemic. Wave’s concept, ‘Closer / Further,’ held the paradox of social distancing — forced physically apart, people grew mentally closer, pulled together by one shared problem — and that distance between people became the central motif. The work is full of typographic motion, because the distances were literally between the letters: they drew closer and moved apart, forming unusual configurations that had to account for physical distance while still keeping a connection. Wave delivered a dynamic logo that appeared in several forms, an unusual system of typographic combinations — sometimes spacing the letters so far apart that each became a star in a constellation — plus merch and motion advertising for digital screens. It is a compact, expressive demonstration of turning a difficult moment into a typographic idea.