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dipshop has designed the identity for the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026 without a single photograph, drawing instead on three things that usually sit unnoticed inside an image: depth of field, lens flares and burned film. Rather than graphically representing those phenomena directly, the Cologne-based design studio worked back to the conditions that produce them, translating the optical and material behaviour of the medium into a graphic language for a festival appearing at eight Hamburg institutions from June to September 2026 under the theme ‘Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other.’
Two primitive forms lead the system. The circle comes from the optics of photography, referencing the behaviour of light as it passes through a lens and meets the camera’s optical system. The rounded rectangle is drawn from the perforations along analogue film – usually taken for a technical detail, historically essential to pulling film through a camera. The third phenomenon, depth of field, takes no shape of its own; it enters as blur. “By altering the sharpness of the geometric elements, it changes how they are perceived and articulated rather than adding another formal component to the identity,” Founder & Creative Director Leon Schniewind notes.
Colour follows the same principle as photography’s underlying mechanics. dipshop worked exclusively in RGB, using each colour at 100% and 50% saturation, a reference to additive colour mixing and the way digital images are formed. Through blending modes, those six values generate an extended palette of 12 across the identity. “The blending logic is what turns a very limited colour palette into a flexible system,” Schniewind tells us. “The use of blending modes also references the photographic relationship between positive and negative,” he continues. “Colours shift and transform through overlap and interaction, introducing a principle of inversion that is inherent to photographic image-making.”
Print and digital use soft gradient fields, while the exhibition graphics switch to flat orange with black type. “The gradients are one expression of the identity, not its defining characteristic,” Schniewind explains, pointing to the geometric forms, the colour system and the typographic framework as the constants from which different expressions emerge. The exhibition design was developed independently by Jutta Wasser in collaboration with curator Mark Sealy, and the festival map folds a dense, colour-coded programme on a utilitarian sheet. “When information becomes the primary focus, the role of the identity is to support access and understanding rather than draw attention to itself,” Schniewind reveals.
The wordmark is set in EK Baumer by Erkin Karamemet, a neo-grotesque whose soft curves and pronounced roundness echo the geometric system. “It offered the right balance,” Schniewind explains, its character keeping the typography from feeling overly technical while the geometric forms carry the conceptual weight. From the typeface’s stylistic set, the studio used only the alternate double-storey ‘a,’ letting the letterform hold a subtle connection to the roundness running through the shapes. Alongside the wordmark sits an abstract mark that’s like a set of vertical strokes; it belongs to the Triennial’s existing identity and predates the 2026 edition, so dipshop’s task was to build a framework that could coexist with it rather than replace it.
Because the phenomena were translated into a controlled graphic system rather than reproduced photographically, consistency across billboards, screens and large-scale walls was less challenging than it might appear. RGB and CMYK diverge, and blending modes are not interpreted identically across software. “By keeping the underlying structure simple and flexible, the identity could adapt to different environments while maintaining a consistent character,” Schniewind concludes, “without requiring every application to be reproduced in exactly the same way.”