Montreux Jazz Festival

This is a brand identity for the 2021 Montreux Jazz Festival. Each year the festival welcomes artists of all kinds to compete in a light-hearted poster contest. Appropriately, the theme for 2021 was “Restart.”

I was immediately interested in the idea of an ouroboros, a serpent that symbolizes the unity of all things spiritual or material and their eternal cycle of destruction and recreation. To keep the ouroboros relevant to the music, I scanned worn jazz sheet music then warped them to create alternative “scales” for the serpent. 

My inspiration behind the color and typeface was vintage vinyl covers from artists like Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong, and Aretha Franklin, whom once performed at the legendary Montreux Jazz Festival.