Off Topic

Lead visual design: definition of the system, its rules and its components. Materials were produced with it by the Off Topic team, external collaborators and the Colibrì Vision team.

Off Topic is a cultural venue in Turin with an established identity and real recognition in the city. The project isn't a rebrand, it's a system built around what already exists.

The reason is the volume and variety of what the venue communicates. Off Topic hosts a large number of independent events, external collaborations and third-party projects, which means a lot of different people producing materials, with very different levels of design experience. The identity had to work in their hands, not only in a designer's.

The logo stayed. Everything else was rebuilt around it.

Typography starts from the logo: Antonio Bold sets the tone, so titles use a face that echoes it, with Bricolage Grotesque underneath for everything else. The pairing keeps the recognisable weight of the brand at the top and brings a more current voice into the body of the material.

The palette was yellow and black. Four colours were added, each with a full scale from 50 to 900, which is what makes the identity able to cover dozens of different events without every one of them looking the same, or looking like a different venue.

Typography, colour, layout logic and usage rules were defined so the identity could cover a wide range of events and formats and still read as one place.

The system lives in Figma as components, templates and modular grids: monthly programme layouts, social formats, poster and billboard grids, outdoor formats and editorial structures. Someone producing an event announcement starts from a structure that already holds, rather than from an empty file and a set of guidelines they have to interpret.

That's what determines whether a system like this survives. Rules that require judgement get applied unevenly by people who don't have the training to make that judgement; a template holds on its own.

Over the year, the system carried somewhere between 300 and 500 pieces of material, at a pace of more than one social asset a day, alongside the print side: posters, outdoor signage, and the printed material for the courtyard and the building.

That volume is the actual test of a system like this. Producing at that rate means most pieces get made quickly, often by different people, and the identity holds or it doesn't.