MOUE festival 2026, “Design fuori fuoco”
How can design tell the story of a territory, its nuances and its inhabitants? MOUE is the first social design festival in Foggia, Italy, where design culture meets local activism and institutions and becomes civic engagement and a way for activating spaces and communities. MOUE stems from the cooperation between Generact, a local youth association, and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Foggia. The 2026 edition was co-organized by the Municipality of Foggia, under the patronage of AIAP (Italian Association of Visual Communication Design).
The title of the second edition “Design fuori fuoco” (Out of focus design) is an invitation to rethink design as an open and informal practice that highlights what remains marginal: people, places and situations. A practice with blurred edges, subject to continuous transformations since it’s deeply intertwined with the different cultural, social and geographical contexts from which it originates. An action that generates a social, shared and common value long before the economic gain.
The visual identity is built around two fundamentals: the mutability of boundaries, rendered through the merging frames of the videos, and the illustrations which follow the introduction of the cantieri (construction sites): nine workshops where students and citizens, together with designers and local associations, work to leave a tangible mark of their commitment on the city. The visual communication was entirely developed by students from the BA Graphic Design program at the Fine Arts Academy of Foggia.
Aiming to center what’s typically relegated to the margins, the compositional dynamic pushes typographic elements to the edges, where they originate, persist and move. In this way, the boundaries become the center of the main information for the event. In its digital and print applications, the typeface used is Milligram by Zetafonts. Specifically, the Macro variant is utilized for headlines. It features tight tracking and a high optical weight that maximizes the visual density of the text blocks. In contrast, the body copy uses the Standard version, whose wider proportions and calibrated apertures ensure optimal readability even at smaller point sizes.
