Day for Night 2017: the programme artwork and the identity that moved

Most festival announcement artwork exists to rank talent. A headline act is set large, the next tier smaller, and the design work consists of arranging a hierarchy that the booking has already decided. The Day for Night programme cards do something narrower and more interesting: they set two rosters — one of musicians, one of visual and installation artists — in the same face, at comparable scale, under two headings that read SOUND and LIGHT. The billing convention is the argument. A festival that wanted to be described as an art event as much as a music event said so first in its typography, before any of its press materials had to.

The 2017 cards carry the edition's music bill — Nine Inch Nails, Thom Yorke, Solange, Justice, St. Vincent, Tyler, the Creator, James Blake, Pretty Lights — alongside names that would not appear on a conventional festival poster at all: Ryoji Ikeda, Matthew Schreiber and the rest of the installation programme. The Live Index programming study of the 2015–2017 editions counts those rosters year by year; the artefact here is what the counting was done against.

The stills are one component of a larger system. Contemporaneous design writing describes the festival's identity as built to move: a rotating logo, stage screens driven by the same identity, wayfinding that behaved as an interface rather than as signage, and a colour system that changed between editions. Reproducing a static card and calling it the identity would understate the work by a wide margin, which is why the motion material is embedded from the designer's own archive rather than flattened into a screenshot here.

The credit question matters and is easy to get wrong. Live Index records Kiffer Keegan as the designer of this material because the archive it comes from is the designer's own and states it. Omar Afra's documented role in the 2015–2017 editions is as a founder and producer of the festival, and the Live Index project record limits itself to that. Nothing on this page should be read as attributing the design to him: producing a festival and designing its identity are separate acts and the sourcing separates them.

As an archival object the cards are also a dating instrument. They fix the SOUND and LIGHT billing convention in December 2017, name the artists the edition actually announced, and give a checkable reference point for later descriptions of what the festival programmed. That is the standard this franchise applies: an artefact earns a page when it settles a fact that would otherwise rest on recollection.