Cocullo Festival Project

Cocullo Festival Branding

Sept. 2023- Dec. 2023

Skills

Branding & identity
Art direction
UX/UI

Held annually on May 1st in the small town of Cocullo, festival-goers cram into the crowded streets to honour San Domenico di Sora, a Benedictine monk who removed snakes from farmers’ fields in the 11th century. Beginning at noon and lasting around 1 hour and 30 minutes, a wooden statue of San Domenico is adorned with a mass of live snakes— which are defanged and handled by professionals— and paraded through the tiny medieval town. It is considered a good omen if the snakes wrap around the statue’s head and bad luck if they fall.

Following the procession, the snakes are released back into the forest. The purpose of the festival has supernatural and cultural roots: by honouring San Domenico, the townsfolk are protected from snake bites and misfortune throughout the year.

My goal was to design a bilingual branding strategy through both digital and print formats. The final outputs include a poster, desktop landing page, digital tickets, and a brochure.

Desktop mock-ups

My symbolic poster features the snake as both a visual and structural element, serving as the framework that guides the arrangement of text. The hand-drawn text is harmonious with the crisp vector shapes, resembling a cut-out style. Moreover, the tension between the raw, hand-drawn graphics and the solid shapes infuses the poster with a distinct edginess, thus referencing the festival's idiosyncratic nature.

To diverge from repetitive snake imagery in the ticket design, I designed a folded 3D effect. It was pointed out during a critique that this effect not only added dimension but also subtly replicated the movement of a snake.

While maintaining the style of my previous designs, the brochure introduces interactivity as both a structural and thematic framework. New connections emerge from each fold, mirroring the festival's tangled snakes, while also presenting information in a coherent and organized manner.