Spatial Festival 2025: SMLXL and Mallandrich build an identity you can move through

Spatial, a Berlin festival of immersive spatial sound at the Funkhaus, returned for a second edition in 2025 occupying five of the former broadcasting station's rooms, each built for sounds coming from walls, floors, columns and ceilings. The organizers needed an identity that reflected that experimental experience without intimidating or over-complicating it.

Make the festival identity a spatial experience: SMLXL and Mallandrich built the brand as liminal 3D spaces to move through, with motion designed in from the start.

SMLXL and motion designer Gerard Mallandrich collaborated from the outset so movement would be the foundation of the brand rather than a final layer. They 3D-scanned Funkhaus's rooms, found them too busy, and designed a fictional liminal virtual space instead — with cinematic exaggerated vanishing points — that became the source the identity's graphics emerge from. Clean, monochrome Neue Haas Grotesk typography kept type out of the way, letting distorted imagery, film-like depth and projected motion carry the festival across website, posters, merchandise and live projections.

The identity won Best of Discipline in Brand/Communication Design at the ADC 105th Annual Awards in 2026. It gave the second-edition festival a single visual world across five rooms, an interactive website whose behaviors mirrored the concept, and physical applications from projections to printed collateral — with artists and attendees responding to the identity as a living part of the event itself.

Spatial is a Berlin festival built around immersive spatial sound, and for its 2025 edition it took over five rooms of the Funkhaus, the city's former broadcasting station, each engineered so sound arrives from walls, floors, columns and ceilings. Such an experimental event needed a visual identity that could reflect that experience without becoming intimidating or complex.

Organizers turned to New York and Barcelona-based studio SMLXL and long-term collaborator Gerard Mallandrich. The pair worked together from the start so that motion thinking would be part of the identity's foundation, not an added layer. Rather than presenting clean static visuals, they made movement the brand's voice — the way the identity itself would transition between environments, just as visitors move between sonic spaces at the festival.

Their process began with 3D scans of Funkhaus's rooms, which proved too busy, so they designed a fictional liminal virtual space instead, using cinematic techniques with exaggerated vanishing points. Typography was kept deliberately minimal — monochrome Neue Haas Grotesk — so the distorted imagery, typography and motion could do the work. The graphics become a space in themselves, something audiences move through rather than simply look at.

The digital-first system still adapted to physical formats: projections inside the event spaces, printed collateral and merchandise, and a website whose interactive behavior was encoded natively into the design. In 2026 the project earned Best of Discipline in Brand/Communication Design at the ADC 105th Annual Awards.

Building motion into the identity from the start made movement part of the brand's meaning rather than an effect applied afterwards.

Replacing the too-busy 3D scans with a designed liminal space gave the festival one coherent parallel universe to draw its whole campaign from.

Stripped-back type let the spatial distortion carry the character, keeping the system legible while it stayed experimental.

A digital-first system that could still be reinterpreted physically meant the identity survived across website, projection, print and merch without breaking.

When the product is an immersive experience, the identity should behave like one too: design the brand as a space people enter, and let motion be the language instead of decoration.

The identity accompanied Spatial's second edition through its full run of festival assets and stayed visible online through the studio's case page and design press coverage into 2026. Its Best of Discipline win at the ADC 105th Annual Awards added a festival identity to the studio's portfolio alongside other cultural clients. SMLXL's creative director noted the reception was positive and that a future edition would be 'a fun challenge to rethink and push the envelope further' — treating the identity as a system designed to evolve rather than a one-off poster set.