Between Land and Sea
Website design and build for a five-day cultural festival in the Mediterranean
Type: Responsive website
Role: UX/UI Designer, Art Director, Developer
Client: Fondazione Studio Rizoma
Link: betweenlandandsea.org
Between Land and Sea is a 5-day cultural festival organised by Fondazione Studio Rizoma, an association for artistic productions, in Palermo at the end of 2021. The concept behind the festival's projects, performances and talks was to shine a light on three port cities that connect different cultures in the Mediterranean: Palermo, Bremen and Tunis. From here the name 'Between Land and Sea'.
The visual identity of the festival is designed by Ciao Ciao Studio, a graphic design studio in Palermo.
The website
The client needed a digital outlet to present the festival to the public, along with all the artists and projects' details, the daily program and some editorial pieces to be published as a blog, all displayed in a concise yet visually engaging way.
After agreeing with the client on the design side, I've built the website in Wordpress with the help of a site builder called Semplice (with customisation on my side: HTML + CSS).
Animations
Together with the client we decided to add some spark to the logotype, so I animated it for both the website and the opening cover of videos produced during the festival.
The straight text line breaks down and creates the port silhouette we can find on maps, a visual separation between land and sea.
The animations were created in After Effects and then exported as Javascript files via an AE extension called Bodimovin.
This allowed me to easily convert the 2d animation in code to be implemented in the website and rendered live in the page as SVG animated shapes - always crisp and defined no matter what device you're looking at the site from.
Animations created in After Effects can easily be converted in Javascript files via the Bodymovin extension.
Once embedded as a javascript snippet in the page's desired position, the animation renders smoothly in the browser.
More materials
Along with the team at Ciao Ciao Studio we designed also a publication which collected all the festival's editorial outputs as well as articles and interviews with the artists and other participants. The booklet was then printed and distributed freely at all festival's venues around the city of Palermo.
