The Sonorities Festival runs once every two years and provides an opportunity for artists worldwide to gather in Belfast to present and experience new work. Since 1981, Sonorities has led the way for musicians, composers, artists and researchers to create and perform works and, as they put it, “make a joyful commotion”.
It is based at Ireland’s most advanced music venue: The Sonic Lab at SARC, Belfast. SARC is part of the Queen’s University School of Arts, English and Languages. A centre for interdisciplinary research in music and sound, which brings together researchers focusing on contemporary practices, historical research, audio engineering and psychology. What is performed at the festival is proudly discordant, ground-breaking and fearless. They clearly know that the festival may not be “for” everyone, and the tag was even “You might not like it”.
We worked with their team to develop the festival’s first long-term Branding and rollout onto a new website, promoting events and spotlighting artists.
—
Visit The Sonorities Festival Website.
The brand mark arose from our initial discussions with the team in SARC when they were describing the festival’s scope. They wanted a symbol which would not reference Western musical annotation or traditional audio technology (such as EQs) since the performances were genre-busting and from global artists. Our solution concept was “Broken Geometric”, which could constantly shift and react in whatever medium it used.
I wanted to say that we got wonderful feedback on the designs and website. It has been an absolute pleasure working with all of you. Director of Sonorities Festival Belfast
I wanted to say that we got wonderful feedback on the designs and website. It has been an absolute pleasure working with all of you.
Director of Sonorities Festival Belfast
Our brief for the Sonorities website was to build a unique and informative home for the ’22 festival, which could then be built upon for each future festival, so it became a vast archive of past artists and performances. Additionally, the festival had been running since 1981, and no central public source was available to view what had come before. So another long-term goal for the site is to start going back through the records and building an open archive of recorded performances.
We built a solid custom WordPress site with powerful vital features such as event, date, venue and artist filtering. The site was created for people on the move through the city, enabling embedded audio previews and video performances to promote exploration and discovery.
By the performance dates of the festival, we had 105 artist profiles on the site, matched into 27 events. Visitors could watch live-streamed performances and join the conversation from their phones. All recorded performances were later added to the events page, so that the site adapted to become the story of the ’22 festival.
Bag of Bees tackled the challenge of branding our unruly music festival with the utmost creativity and sensitivity to our ethos.
I am not alone in being delighted with the results of this collaboration. Our festival artists and audience members alike have consistently praised the glitchy, synthetic yet also somehow organic look and feel of our new website and promotional materials.
This was not a trivial task, but the combined expertise and artistry of Bag of Bees made this a joyous process. Their attention to detail and ability to think outside the box, both in terms of visual aesthetics and how to organise complex sets of information, culminated in a website which is both easy to navigate and exciting to explore.
Bag of Bees’ design for Sonorities truly mirrors our desire to search for beauty in the chaos. If you are looking for a branding and web design team who care deeply about the ambitions of their clients and have the skill to deliver, you are unlikely to find better than Bag of Bees.”
Paul Stapleton | Director | Sonorities Festival Belfast
Project Type: Strategic Brand Transformation
Disciplines: Brand Strategy Brand Visual Identity Graphic Design Website Design
We partnered with Queen’s University Innovations Programmes Department to create a new brand encouraging Researchers to start the Invention Disclosure process.
Discover how branding can help University Spin-outs establish credibility.
A look at the idea behind our recent Brand Transformation project for The PILS Project.
Our website development project for Digital Health and Care NI (DHCNI) has launched.
Sonorities have released the visual theme for Sonorities 2024 to the public.
Community Places was established in 1984 as a charity and not-for-profit social enterprise dealing with Planning Advice and Community Engagement.
We recently did an on-press approval for an intricate piece of print designed for our client, SAM Mouldings.
Start-ups must invest in their branding to improve their chance of success as they journey through pre-seed programmes, seed funding applications, pitches to investors, and attracting VC funding.
Success Story: Bia Analytical is a food authentication testing laboratory. They are a world leader in developing scientific methods to test food quality, authenticity and safety analysis.
The NI Museums Council have publicly released their new Brand and Website Design.
It’s time to share our recent Brand Transformation project for Bia Analytical, a food authentication testing laboratory.
"*" indicates required fields