Fórum do Futuro: Ágora Club

Bill Display in use for the identity of Ágora Club, obviously chosen because of the resemblance to antique Greek capital letters. Greece is not the direct source for Bill’s shapes though, which is based on lettering by Max Bill in the late 1940s (see comment). From Non-Verbal Club’s case presentation:

Porto City Hall introduces the Forum of the Future as its “annual project of lectures and performances that challenges thinkers from different disciplines and backgrounds to discuss urgent issues facing contemporary societies”. We were invited to design the communication for the 2018 edition, in which the reflection of classic antiquity on contemporary societies was discussed under the title Ágora Club.

The theme opens a wide field of interesting possibilities for graphic exploration. We’ve started drafting visual structures that blended typologies and crossed language references from both the antique and contemporary worlds, trying to incorporate principles of translation and a sense of time play.

For the display materials, we’ve developed a simple information structure based on center aligned typography, referencing the aesthetics of stone engraving and type on monuments. While most information is set on a friendly sans serif, we appreciate the (kitschy) interference introduced by its (greekish) pair, placing the communication in a less predictable tone and playing with the common ideas of visual language associated with ancient times – could be read as a sort of neo neo classicism. The information was paired with two different image resources:
1. a representation of the discobolus rendered in a very reflective chrome material for the general Forum of the Future campaigns; and
2. photographs of the invited speakers and performers for single event campaigns.

Design: Non-Verbal Club (Irina Pereira and João Novais).
3D-rendering: Lyft Creative Studio