The Notes You Don’t Design

Baillat Studio, MONTREAL INTERNATIONAL JAZZ FESTIVAL 2019, Entire Promotional Design Program, 2020 Design Awards winner.

Baillat Studio’s 2020 Design Award-winning promotional program is music to the eyes.

For those of us lucky to have had a robust musical education, seeing music means reading musical notation. You can hear the sounds in clefs and quarter tones. An even luckier few, the chromesthetes, see sound as colour, shape and movement. Every LP becomes a personal lightshow.

For the rest of us, however, music conjures up a tapestry of experiences: windows down with an old tape deck, gatefold double albums, carefully curated Spotify playlists, and much more, but perhaps the most visceral is the shared experience of live music. An experience that seems somewhat distant these days, but has persevered in virtual forms and travelling truck beds, such is our desire to be transported by sound.

For the 40^th anniversary of The Montreal International Jazz Festival, Baillat Studio had the distinct challenge of capturing the feeling that the historic festival summons from its summery stage. Utilizing bold, almost irradiated colours, and contrasting imagery of lush flowers and serrated cacti, Baillat Studio subtly incorporates the sunshine vibes of the festival, its reputation for a place where talent flourishes, and the duality of jazz itself, with its soft and hard moments, its melody and dissonance.

Studio Baillat designed a promotional program for a musical festival without a single note or instrument, but one that lets you see music how you feel it. If you have a similarly harmonious design project that you think is award-worthy, you’re in luck, as our Design Awards deadline has come out for an encore. You now have until March 9, 2021.