SPREAD: creative team behind the Tsubame-Sanjo Factory Festival's design

Every year in October, Tsubame-Sanjo Factory Festival (Kouba no Saiten) sees the small metalworking factories and workshops of Tsubame-Sanjo area in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, open their doors to share the experience of craftsmanship and manufacturing with the public. The festival brand is recognisable by its signature pink and white stripes – the pink evokes the glow of flames and the diagonal stripe pattern is inspired by the yellow-and-black hazard stripes used throughout Tsubame-Sanjo's factories. The creative team behind this is SPREAD Ltd., who also provided artistic and design direction for the Biology of Metal exhibition at Japan House London in 2018, which was inspired by the festival.

In September 2018, as part of the exhibition-related event programme, Japan House hosted a talk by Kobayashi Hirokazu and Yamada Haruna of SPREAD, during which they discussed the creative vision behind the Tsubame-Sanjo Factory Festival branding and introduced some of their other projects. One such project is ‘Life Stripe’ which uses bands of colour to represent an individual’s daily, weekly or monthly routines to create beautiful visual patterns.

About SPREAD

SPREAD is a creative unit founded by Kobayashi Hirokazu and Yamada Haruna in 2004, combining their respective experiences in landscape and graphic design. They use colour in their exploration of concepts of dismantling and rebuilding memory to spread multidisciplinary creations to the future. 

For more information, visit SPREAD website.