Studio Frith creates Patti Smith-inspired identity for the inaugural Art Night festival

London-based Studio Frith, working with Unlimited Productions, has created an identity for Art Night – a new London festival inspired by the Nuit Blanche movement that started in Paris in 2002. The new identity, used across printed promotional materials and the festival website, plays with the idea of London after dark.

“We listened to Patti Smith’s Because the Night and realised the thing that makes the night exciting is possibility. The empty space normally occupied by sleep,” says Frith Kerr, founder of Studio Frith. “We became interested in the negative space, how it refers to ‘night’ as well as the space of an ‘art institution’. We developed a typeface with negative space in key letter forms that could work on a two dimensional page as well as be a three-dimensional object; robust enough to have stature but empty enough for the complexity of the art world.” 

Studio Frith’s work for Art Night follows several projects with leading institutions globally, including Frieze Art Fairs in 2015, Serpentine Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum and an upcoming collaboration with the Solomon Guggenheim Museum New York on the design of the 2016 Hugo Boss Art Prize catalogue.