The Wave Studio Builds an Explosive Identity for Design Bomb Festival
An event built around making connections needs an identity that brings people together. For Design Bomb Festival, The Wave Studio translated that ambition into a visual system full of colour, movement and personality. Originally conceived as a networking event, Design Bomb expanded into a three-day festival dedicated to design in all its forms, held from May 22 to 24, 2026, in Catania, Sicily.
The name provided the starting point for the creative direction. The challenge was to capture an explosion of energy, ideas and people while avoiding predictable imagery. The Wave Studio approached the word “bomb” through shape, typography and colour, creating a visual language that could express the collective energy of the festival across a wide range of formats.
A concentric, multicoloured star anchors the identity. Its layered structure gives the system a sense of outward movement, establishing a recognisable motif that carries through the festival’s communications. Alongside it, a bold wordmark set in Frama by Pangram Pangram brings a strong typographic presence, balancing the complexity of the central graphic with a direct, dynamic treatment of the name.
A family of stickers extends the identity into a more varied and expressive vocabulary. Designed to represent speakers, sponsors and individual moments throughout the programme, these elements allow the festival’s many participants to share a common visual language while retaining their own character. The approach gives the system room to evolve as the content changes.
That balance between consistency and variation shaped the identity’s physical applications. Badges, lanyards, T-shirts, a wooden crate and the festival programme each carry the same visual energy, adapted to their particular format and purpose. An activation developed with Caffè Moak further extends the system, bringing a partner collaboration into the festival’s visual world.
Across these touchpoints, repetition builds recognition while the combination of graphic elements keeps the identity lively. Each application contributes to a larger whole, with enough flexibility to introduce its own small burst of personality. The result reflects Design Bomb’s evolution: a networking event growing into a broader platform for encounters, exchange and creative expression.
Founded in 2019, The Wave is an Italian digital agency with offices in Catania, Milan and Palermo. Its team of more than 30 professionals works across branding, art direction, graphic design, digital communication, web development and digital experiences. For Design Bomb Festival, that multidisciplinary approach takes the form of a cohesive identity designed to move from communication into the festival experience itself.
