Swiss studio Neo Neo creates toothpaste-inspired identity for cultural festival

La Bâtie is a Geneva-based festival featuring cultural events, concerts, dance and art shows for 15 days. Swiss studio Neo Neo was tasked with creating an identity for the festival last year, and it’s back once more with a refreshing and minty take on the event. 

“We wanted to create lightness and absurdity. It was a simple idea but we thought let’s cover it with toothpaste, make it fresh. We wanted nonsense to be the concept,” explains Xavier Erni co-founder of Neo Neo. “We wanted those big toothpaste traces to be a fresh pop culture emblem covering some cheap pictures disproportionately.” 

The images were bought from random image banks and depict nondescript people and animals. The perfectly formed toothpaste squidge is the Aquafresh icing on the cake as the white, turquoise and red creates a wonderful contrast with the ordinariness of the pictures peeking through. To ground the frivolity of the visuals, simple san serif type called Sharper surrounds the posters in a border, and was specially created for the event. 

Other marketing materials including the festival catalogue continue the toothpaste theme, by mimicking the aesthetic of dental ads with pearly white smiles and more pristine blobs of toothpaste and tubes. Last year the studio used cartoon woodland animals and a red and white check as the visual for the festival and it’s great to see Neo Neo once again be bold enough to embrace the unexpected. “What we, and the festival, like about the identity is that it’s simply really weird and absurd to have toothpaste as a main campaign motif for an artistic festival,” says Xavier.