The 2019 festival identity for Cine Magnífico uses color, movement and mysticism to bring multiple narratives together—and invite a broader audience to take part.

A few years ago, we got to design the logo and branding for Cine Magnífico,  Albuquerque’s Latinx film festival and an initiative of the local Instituto Cervantes. Since then, we’ve been excited to see it in use as the festival grew year after year. Naturally, were very excited when they invited us back to create the 2019 festival identity.

In addition to delivering an identity applied to all its many contexts successfully, they had some changes they were looking to make.

First, Cine Magnífico wanted to change the way it approached themes and graphics to represent multiple cultural spaces: New Mexico, Spain, Latin America and Latinx spaces in the U.S. In previous years, the festival had leaned into themes centered on Mexican folklore, so this move to represent other facets of its identity was a leap.

Second, they wanted to expand their audience, attracting and including more young people, for example, without alienating existing festivalgoers.

With our brief in hand, we looked for themes that accommodated the multiple cultural identities that Cine Magnífico wanted to include in this year’s design. It needed to be relevant across cultures, and to be recognizable by a broad audience. But we also had to avoid themes that were so universal they came off as generic.

We came up with three options, and with Cine Magnífico, landed on an approach that played with formats related to mysticism and luck. We started looking at lotería cards, local superstitions, rituals and artifacts.

For our first set of designs, we presented one piece that evolved from Lotería cards, one that centered on the tale of Saint Jordi, and a third that was inspired by palm-reading diagrams.

The hand with all its symbols contained, on its surface, the convergence of all the cultural symbols along with icons that touch on elements in narrative. And as we developed this piece into a system, we made sure to keep them distinct so we could later include individual symbols into the festival program and newsletter designs.

After some tinkering with the background, the festival identity was born.

The festival identity was first applied to a promotional full-size poster, followed by postcards printed in English and in Spanish, flyers, header images made to fit their website, social platforms, t-shirts, a newsletter template, a festival letterhead template for use on Word, and a festival program. The identity was also applied to the festival’s website.