The theme of the 14th Design Festival ‘Tell us a story’ acknowledges the link between individual stories and design inspiration and creation, its aim is to allow people to connect with design on a personal level

Boccalatte designed an old-school penguin classic style ” Storytelling book” which transcends the regular festival program.

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Past Sydney Design Logos / Posters below

Recently Boccalatte were asked ‘what the hell, is the Sydney Design design then, and what does it all mean?’

This year the Sydney Design theme is story telling. So every design has a story, in case you were wondering. Or we believe it should. So as part of a design process, conversations take place between the designer and the audience—connecting ideas, desire and needs.

Sydney Design is self described as a series of events, activities, discussions and lectures—creating a convergence of designers, photographers, stylists, craftspeople, designers, curators and artists.

So we plotted the events from around and about Sydney Design with a starting point from Powerhouse Museum, using a Google map reference, with events branching out and connecting to each other with drawn lines.

These are playing with notions of social relationships, networks and narrative pathways. The overlapping lines and colours representing the depth, movement and connections that storytelling creates.

An anatomy of a network. These connections create virtual spaces. But it could represent the wonderful variety of design whether it be graphics, architecture, industrial or fashion or even origami.

And because we have a penchant for books, this year we really did encourage something we think is quite unique for a Festival… we designed the pocketbook. With a Penguin classic paperback in mind, we organised a book printer to produce a black & white book. This made sense, after all this year’s theme is storytelling.

Hopefully people will pick up and keep the book and not dispose of it like so much festival ephemera.