Rendezvous with Madness

How do you design to fight stigma? By being real.

As an industry, film festivals work to uncover the untold stores of their audiences through engaging, interactive, and authentic content. For the Rendezvous with Madness Festival, this mandate is particularly important as festival organizations position their events as an accessible, "happy place" for audiences members navigating personal mental health challenges.   In designing an identity for the Festival theme, we worked with the concept of an amusement park to signify the variety of content and the overall feeling of positivity the festival aims to promote. At the organizers' request, we ensured that the design incorporated a depiction of Sigmund Freud so as to remain consistent with Rendezvous' iconography, but added very realistic emojis to the carnival carousel to address the role of emotions in daily life and the effect of technology on our sanity. Though hand-drawn, our design refined and promoted the Festival's image to new audiences, and easily supported Rendezvous with Madness' aim of fighting the stigmas associated with mental health challenges through authenticity in film.