Baillat turns MAPP’s real festival expenses into its campaign artwork

MAPP, the Montreal video-mapping festival, was heading towards the celebration of its 10th edition when the provincial government deprioritised funding to the cultural sphere, cutting the operational budget so deeply that a full-scale edition became impossible. Rather than skip a year, the festival mounted a lighter interim edition to raise money towards the real 10th, naming it 9.5 instead. Montreal-based design studio Baillat was brought in to build the fundraising campaign around that half-step, turning the festival’s financial predicament into the subject of the work. From the outset, the campaign was going to be about the money. “It was clear that the campaign would focus on the financial tribulations of the festival to better contextualise the fundraising activities,” Senior Designer Léon Lo tells us, and “it was a short leap to get to the 9.5$ hook from there.” Creative Director Jean-Sébastien Baillat coined the ‘point five’ edition and the 9.5$ tagline, and having worked with MAPP in various capacities over the years, the studio found the client receptive to the confrontational tone from the beginning. For MAPP’s part, this framing was impactful internally. “The moment we started framing this as 9.5 rather than a gap or a pause, everything shifted,” General Manager & Programming Director Thien Vu Dang explains, “it became a choice, something deliberate, something we were authoring rather than enduring.” The 9.5$ figure became the campaign’s tagline and its raw material, set in the techno-grotesk OT Alpha by Omnitype, the typeface prescribed by MAPP’s own branding and one that suited what Lo calls the “admin-core” approach of the base system to a tee. Distressed from fast, cheap reproduction and reduced to a no-frills black and white, the tagline is treated less as a fixed logo than as a shape to modulate, blown up, fragmented and repeated across every touchpoint, its impact sharpened by extreme scale differences between the underlying base and the figurative text. “The tagline was used as a visual element to play with, modulating in myriad ways,” Lo details, “creating excitement and expression from something so dry.” A photocopied roughness runs under all of it, but the risk with that kind of designed degradation is that it looks accidental. “The key to communicating intentionality is consistency,” Lo notes; the lo-fi treatment was chosen to evoke the cheapest print solutions available, then applied without exception across print, social and web.