Fringe Festival & Trois Mille
Untitled Macau has been a long time supporter of Sharp Type, having used our typefaces in a variety of projects since its inception in 2017. Led by founder Au Chon Hin, the studio has established itself as a pioneering design force in Macau. Their unabashedly bold use of color and figurative lines imbue the work with an instantly recognizable visual language and a distinctive aesthetic. Recently, the studio undertook the creation of the Shenzhen Fringe Festival's visual identity, which was centered around typography. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Untitled Macau featured Trois Mille (3000) as a core typographic element.
Trois Mille is expressive and energetic, lending its bold charm to the festival's visual identity. It notably and beautifully coexists alongside the Chinese characters used, denoting the city's East-West cultural dynamics, colonial past, and global-facing present. Whether taken at a glance or with perusal, the festival's graphic design possesses a controlled chaos and deliberate density -- perhaps mirroring Macau itself, which is the most densely populated region in the world.
The original Fringe Festival took place in Edinburgh in 1947, soon after the end of World War II. Eight theater troupes congregated on the fringes of a festival to which they had not been invited and spontaneously began their own event. This set a precedent for the following years, and then decades. Today, it proclaims itself the "world's largest art fair," taking place over three weeks each August and featuring participants from every genre of art. The Shenzhen Fringe Festival had its inaugural year in 2010 and is loosely based on the Edinburgh original. With its stylistic verve, Untitled Macau's work at this year's Shenzhen Fringe Festival evokes the anarchist spirit of its British forebear, but their maximalist design execution needs no context. Similarly, Trois Mille's dynamic beauty provides support for the rest of the visual identity, but it, too, exists confidently on its own, in any context.