bsff
A Cinematic Identity for a Festival Without One
A Cinematic Identity for a Festival Without One
The Brussels Short Film Festival (BSFF) runs on genuinely strong content — national and international competitions, open-air screenings, industry events and youth programmes, all packed into one city every spring — but its website didn’t reflect any of that energy. Visual identity was limited to the yearly poster and logo, which change edition to edition and never carry through to the site itself; everything past that was plain text on a static layout, with no visual world tying the pages together. Navigation made it worse: a menu packed with sections and sub-sections made it easy for a first-time visitor to get lost looking for something specific.
This was a graduation project (épreuve intégrée): a full brand and UX/UI redesign of bsff.be, scoped individually end to end.
The direction leans into what a film festival actually is: light in a dark room. A deep cinema grey replaces plain black — warm enough to feel like a cinema hall, not a void — punctuated by film-stock orange and oxide red, with cool blue and green glows marking every interactive moment. The tagline, "Short stories. Long impressions.", sets the tone in a single line. Together, it turns a static, text-heavy site into something that feels like it’s actually screening something.
The primary palette runs from cinema grey (#1E2020) through burnt orange (#E05510) and oxide red (#961E04) to a warm off-white (#FFF3E4), pulled from film stock and darkroom light. A secondary palette of cool blues and green marks glow effects on interactive elements — buttons, map pins, hover states.
Typography splits the same way: Aeonik Mono for interface text and data, Averia Serif Libre for headlines. The identity centres on an eye motif — a line-drawn eye bordered by dashed strips of film perforation — used as the fixed logo mark across every page.
Every choice maps back to the original audit: a flat, text-only site replaced by a consistent visual world built around light, film and colour, and a sprawling menu replaced by pages that surface exactly what a visitor needs — pricing, dates, and how to get there — without making them dig for it.
