The 73rd Dubrovnik Summer Festival will be held under the banner of a new visual identity entitled Between the Stone, designed by visual communications expert Zoran Đukić.
During its 73 years, the Dubrovnik Summer Festival had some of the biggest names, such as Edo Murtić, Fedor Vaić, Branko Kovačević, Ivo Grbić, Edo Kovačević, Tomo Gusić, Luka Gusić, Boris Ljubičić and Orsat Franković design posters and covers, with some of them creating an entire unique visual identity for some of the Festival’s iterations. After two pandemic-stricken years, the Festival finally returns again to conceptualizing visuals as communication holders, this time inspired by the magical atmosphere of the Festival with emphasis placed on the element of nature, the flora growing between the stones, which are an integral part of the City’s scenography.
– The performing arts are mostly enjoyed in the perfectly controlled conditions of air-conditioned halls with carefully designed acoustics and lighting. The Dubrovnik Summer Festival is special precisely because of its magical atmosphere, owing it in part to the scenography of the City, but also to something often overlooked and seemingly invisible – an element of nature that is a cornerstone of every performance. The smell of resin and salt; crickets, bats, and the north wind, the sunset, the full moon or the droplets of sea in the air – all this contributes to the creation of unique and unrepeatable experiences. Through portraits of wild local plants that can be found emerging from(among) the white stone, the visual identity of the Festival draws attention to precisely that delicate, ephemeral layer, providing a different point of view. The almost black-and-white silhouettes of plants, recorded in the contre-jour technique, become symbols, opening to the observer the possibility of inscribing a wide field of meaning. Combined with the bright tones of typographic elements, they evoke a sense of summer at its zenith. This unseen part of Dubrovnik, always in the background in relation to the imposing view of the City walls, can be read as a metaphor for citizens, who also live between the stone - more as something secondary, squeezed by white blocks packed with history - said the designer expounding on his design concept and concluding that the 73rd Dubrovnik Summer Festival posters, in all their colour oversaturation, rich textures, smells and light, are an ode to the Dubrovnik summer.
Zoran Đukić is a visual communications designer with over 15 years of experience, specializing in creating thoughtful and innovative visual identities, publications and exhibitions for a wide range of clients in the cultural sector. He is the founder and head of the đkć d.o.o. studio, and he prefers to design visual identities and theatre posters.