Brand identity design for Spatial festival by Barcelona studio SMLXL and motion designer Gerard Mallandrich transforms the experimental sound experience at Berlin's Funkhaus into a living, kinetic visual system driven entirely by movement and perspective.

Spatial is an immersive sound festival held at Funkhaus, Berlin's iconic former broadcasting station. The event invites attendees to wander through five rooms where sounds emerge from walls, floors, columns, and ceilings, creating distinct sonic environments designed for exploration rather than passive listening. When Spatial returned for its second edition in 2025, the organizers needed a brand identity design that could match this unusual, boundary-pushing concept without becoming overly complex or inaccessible.

For this challenge, Spatial enlisted Barcelona-based design studio SMLXL alongside long-term collaborator Gerard Mallandrich of motion design practice Mallandrich. The result is a brand identity design that feels genuinely alive — reactive, three-dimensional, and unlike anything a static-first approach could have produced.

Brand Identity Design Rooted in Motion Thinking

What sets this brand identity design apart is how early motion entered the creative process. Most branding projects treat animation as a finishing layer, applied once the visual system is established. SMLXL and Mallandrich rejected that model entirely. "From the outset, we envisioned pushing for an identity that would be experiential and strongly driven by movement," says Anna Berbiela, partner and creative director at SMLXL. "Rather than adding motion as a final layer to an already defined system, we wanted motion thinking to be part of the foundation."

This approach allowed the brand identity design to function as a dynamic voice rather than a static container. Motion could embody the physical act of moving between rooms, between sounds, between imagined spaces — exactly what the festival itself is about. A sterile or stationary system would have felt wrong for an event where the audience is always in transit.

The visual language began with 3D scans of Funkhaus' rooms. Finding these too busy, the team instead built a virtual space of their own. Drawing on cinematic techniques — particularly the exaggerated vanishing points of Star Wars opening crawls — SMLXL and Mallandrich created a liminal, digitally rendered environment. "The visuals would become a space in themselves," Anna explains, "something you move through rather than just look at."

Typography within the brand identity design is deliberately stripped back: monochromatically-applied Neue Haas Grotesk, clean and legible, letting the motion and spatial distortion carry the character. Colour, imagery, and type were each tested within the virtual environment to observe how they would warp, shift, and interact. The typographic system could then be framed for static applications while still reflecting the festival's rhythm.

The brand identity design responds to the contexts it inhabits — from the interactive architecture of Spatial's website to physical projections at the venue itself. Attendees and artists experienced it as a presence at the event, not just a promotional layer. The identity felt like a participant. As Anna puts it, the challenge was not simply adding dimension, "but creating a sense that you could actually enter and move through the content."

The SMLXL brand identity design for Spatial is a strong example of what happens when motion and graphic thinking develop together from day one. It sidesteps the category of "animated branding" and becomes something closer to spatial design — a visual world built to be inhabited. View the full project at smlxl.company and the original feature at It's Nice That.