Spatial
A festival you walk through, and an identity built the same way: Spatial, the Berlin festival of immersive and spatial sound, filled five rooms of Funkhaus in 2025 with sound from every surface. SMLXL and Mallandrich made its graphics into environments, spaces to move through rather than images to look at.
Client
Spatial Festival
Credits
Identity, Campaign, Motion Design: SMLXL and Mallandrich. Creative Direction: Anna Berbiela, Javier Arizu, Guillem Casasús, Gerard Mallandrich. Graphic Design: Anna Berbiela, Javier Arizu, Lakis Sobyra. Motion Design: Gerard Mallandrich, Andrea Pascual, Jorge Rivera, Lakis Sobyra. 3D Environment Design: Gerard Mallandrich, Andrea Pascual, Jorge Rivera. Website Development: Program. Photography: Steve Balboni.
Typography
The brief
Spatial is a Berlin festival dedicated to immersive and spatial sound. For its second edition, in September 2025, it took over five rooms of Funkhaus, the former broadcasting centre on the Spree, where around sixty artists played and audiences moved between halls with sound arriving from walls, floors, columns and ceilings. The festival needed a campaign that matched that sense of exploration without turning complex or inaccessible: an identity people could step into, the way they step into the rooms, from screens to print to the venue.
The system
Motion was part of the foundation from the start, never a layer added at the end. The team began with 3D scans of the Funkhaus rooms, found them too busy and built a virtual space of their own instead: a fictional liminal space that acts as a parallel universe for the festival’s visual assets. Borrowing cinematic devices such as the exaggerated vanishing points of a film’s opening crawl, they tested how imagery, type and colour warp inside it. The result behaves like an augmented sonic landscape, its distortion tuned to each context.
The identity
Type stays deliberately quiet so that movement and depth carry the character: Neue Haas Grotesk, set in a single colour, legible in a still frame and clear inside the moving environments. A few unplanned errors in the process were kept, and they shaped the final artwork. The festival website, built by Program, has the identity’s behaviour written into the site itself, while the same system was adapted for printed matter, merchandise, environmental graphics and projections inside Funkhaus, where artists and audiences met it as a presence in the room.
Outcome
Spatial now has an identity that works the way the festival does, a place to move through rather than a picture to look at, carrying the feeling of its rooms from the first animation online to the projections inside Funkhaus.
