Vrints-Kolsteren gives the Brussels Street Photography Festival an identity built around the frayed edges of city life
For the Brussels Street Photography Festival, Vrints-Kolsteren crafted more than a logo—it constructed a visual system rooted in urban immediacy, fragmentary moments, and the subtle grammar of the street.
The City as Medium
The festival celebrates the street not as backdrop, but as author — a place where narratives unfold without permission.
Vrints-Kolsteren approached the project with the same humility that good photographers bring to their subjects: observing first, interpreting later.
The resulting identity is not decorative. It documents. Every texture, frame, and typographic hesitation carries the feeling of a photograph taken mid-movement — imperfect, immediate, sincere.
Designing Through Fragments
Rather than forcing order, the studio leaned into chaos.
Overlapping compositions, cropped edges, and shifting grids mimic the act of walking through a city — the blur of passing moments, the fractured rhythm of attention.
At times, the visuals feel unfinished. At others, hyper-composed.
That duality is the point. The system breathes between the two, capturing the balance between control and chance that defines street photography itself.
Typography as Observation
Typography in the system behaves less like text and more like architecture. It guides, interrupts, and frames — sometimes asserting itself, sometimes disappearing into the image.
Letters stretch and contract across surfaces, interacting with imagery in ways that feel human and instinctive.
It’s a typography that doesn’t perform for the grid; it lives inside it.
Material and Memory
The palette drifts through asphalt greys, muted browns, and the fleeting amber of a streetlight. These tones, paired with heavy paper stocks and visible grain, bring tactility to a subject rooted in the digital.
The work feels printed even when it’s not.
In that texture, there’s memory — a sense that these visuals could fade, crease, or be torn down tomorrow. Just like posters on a city wall, they exist in transition.
