OFFF, a leading festival in Barcelona for creativity and digital art and design, is over 20 years old—mature enough that its original name, Online Flash Film Festival, is no longer relevant. Each year, the event has grown, and each year has its own brand identity. The 2026 identity was literally grown by design firm Uncommon with the help of festival attendees.
From a Creative Bloq article on the project: “Introducing ‘Cultured’ during his opening keynote, [Uncommon co-founder] Nils Leonard asked creatives if they’d been to any of the series of mixers held by Uncommon, supposedly designed to ask them for their opinions on the identity. There was an audible gasp in the audience as he then told us what the mixers were actually for—to harvest the bacteria of the attendees.”
The team swabbed drinking glasses, elevator buttons, and other surfaces that attendees had touched, and those samples were then grown into bacteria blooms in petri dishes. Sped-up, filmed sequences of the bacteria growing as well as stills of beautiful, colorful molds were used as art throughout the identity.
