Work / Case study 02 of 03 · Culture · Music festival
Low Hours
A festival identity that tells the time, and changes colour until sunrise.
Client line · “Music for the hours after midnight.”
Overview
Low Hours is a festival of ambient, experimental and club music held across twelve venues along Rotterdam's harbour. Every set happens between 00:00 and 06:00. It is closer to a concert series than a rave, and in its fourth year it had the strongest line-up in its history.
[01] The challenge
Each year a different illustrator made the festival look different, so nothing built up over time. Low Hours was getting lost among forty other summer festivals. To press and funders, 'midnight to dawn' sounded like a party, which was a problem with the city's three-year arts grant coming up for renewal.
There was a practical problem as well. With sixty acts across twelve venues, the schedule is the product: people plan their route through the night. The old site was a PDF.
[02] The insight
The only thing that stays the same at Low Hours is the clock. Everyone who has been talks in times: 'the 03:40 set', 'when it got light over the Maas'. The schedule isn't admin. It's what people remember.
[03] The idea
Set the brand to the hour. The logo is a six-hour dial, and its sweep shows where you are in the night. Every asset is set to a time. A poster for a 02:10 set takes its colour from 02:10 on a gradient that runs from sodium streetlight through harbour ink to dawn.
The type follows the clock too. The wordmark sits on a variable width axis: tightly condensed at midnight, opening out as the night goes on, fully extended by six. That gives one logo in 360 states, sixty unique artist posters, and a live schedule that is on-brand simply because it knows what time it is.
What we made
Identity system · Variable type direction · Poster system · Schedule website · Motion idents · Wayfinding
- 01
Dial mark & variable wordmark
The wordmark moves from width 62 to 125 between 00:00 and 06:00. One logo, a different state for every minute of the night.
- 02
Hour palette
Seven anchor colours sampled from the harbour at night and blended minute by minute, from streetlight to sunrise.
- 03
Artist poster system
Sixty posters generated from set times and printed as a numbered risograph run. It sold out in nine days.
- 04
Night schedule site
A live timeline that knows what's on now, plans walking routes between venues and works offline once saved.
- 05
Motion idents & wayfinding
Six-second dial idents for every act, cut automatically from the schedule, plus clock-face totems at every venue door.
Outcomes
12/12
venues at capacity, the festival's first full sell-out
+174%
international ticket buyers compared with 2024
41k
schedule-site users over festival weekend, 68% of them on mobile after midnight
€380k
three-year city arts funding renewed, citing 'a clear cultural voice'
Every year we used to start from a blank page. Now we start from a clock. Artists argue over their poster times and the audience plans the night by colour. For the first time it feels like one festival.
Credits
- Client
- Low Hours Foundation
- Identity, motion, web
- off/form
- Risograph printing
- Drukkerij Nachtwerk (fictional)
- Signage fabrication
- Kade Bouw (fictional)
- Ident sound
- Lotte Brink (fictional)
Tags
- Music
- Variable type
- Posters
- Wayfinding
- Web
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Bring us the brief that doesn't fit the template. We'll come back with the one idea that explains it.
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