Poolbar Festival 2026

The visual identity for Poolbar Festival 2026, an annual music festival held in the former indoor swimming pool Altes Hallenbad in Feldkirch, Austria, translates the Poolbar festivals vibe into a flexible graphic system. Built on the festival's yearly theme "placing," the design uses a modular, dynamic grid with rounded connecting curves to express transformation, temporality, and rearrangement. Typography moves along the grid lines and is processed through a custom vector map tool to recreate the water caustics once cast across a pool's surface, linking the graphic identity directly to the building's past and to the lighting design developed for the festival grounds, which was also based on caustic effects. The Altes Hallenbad sits in Feldkirch's Reichenfeld park, a 1960s pool building now used as a cultural venue. Designing for a space with this kind of history called for a system flexible enough to hold many different applications, from large-format posters to smaller print and digital formats, without losing a sense of shared identity. The dynamic grid was chosen for its adaptability: its lines can stretch, rotate, and recombine to fit different proportions, while the rounded curves stop the system from feeling rigid or purely technical. Letting the typography sit directly on this structure meant text and image could be designed together from the start. The caustics effect added an easily recognizable layer to the visual identity. To archive this look, a custom vector tool was built specifically for this project to simulate how light bends and scatters through moving water, applied directly to the typographic forms. This kept the visual language tied to something physical and specific to the place of the festival. Made in collaboration with Amelie Schaeberle, Jil Peters, Emanuel Cosarba and supervisor Michael Marte