64 NICOLE JACEK
Sometimes traditions need a facelift. That’s what was achieved in Nicole Jacek’s Design for the 2006 Ochsenfest, a festival held every second year in Ludwigsburg, Germany (which used to feature the butchering of oxen but now just serves up the poor bovines barbecued).

Nicole Jacek took the festival’s old, flat logo of a white ox on a red background and morphed it into a lenticular Design with an ox whose head twists upward into an electric guitar. “We took the logo—an ox—as a starting point to show the mutation of the traditional festival into an ox-and-music festival,” she explains. While the bullish black-and-white Design provides hours of wrist-flipping fun, it remains clean and simple, a balance attained intentionally. As Jacek states, “We didn’t want to reach only one special group of people. Pictograms are easy to recognize and work well.” The resulting Design is both playful and functional. In the spirit of the festival, Jacek notes, “I think Design can only be good if you have fun doing it. And we had a lot of fun!” by Lara Bullock