Demande Spéciale’s vivid campaign for MAPP MTL 2020 responds to the unknown with ecstatic colour

Celebrating the fifth year of their event, MAPP MTL, a yearly festival dedicated to showcasing the art of projection mapping, have once again turned to Montreal-based design studio Demande Spéciale; this time for their 2020 campaign. With each year prior responding to a theme, this one is no different; reflecting 2020’s ever-present uncertainty through the theme ‘unknown.’ Tonally responding to this theme, Demande Spéciale played with gradients and colours to abstractly suggest an uncertainty and vagueness; finding the absence of colour as important as its presence. The colours themselves were chosen out of a contextual contrast, Co-founder at Demande Spéciale Guillaume Lavallée explains, telling us “the festival is normally in October-November,” which “here in Montréal is the time of the year where everything is really really grey.” This vibrant and lively colour palette performs a beautiful contrast to the climate the pandemic has created, providing a feeling akin to the warmth of a fire on a winter’s day. This is similarly reflected in their documentation of the posters, photographing them in front of glorious scenic backdrops, the likes of which we can but only wish to be within right now. “To be honest, we just really found that funny,” Lavallée remarks, “we thought that was a great contrast with what we used to see in terms of case studies for a digital media festival.”