Steph Katiforis Design

Offside

A soccer‑festival campaign that uses fast‑paced, competition‑driven visual language to capture the energy of the game and transform it into a vibrant cultural event. The promotional posters translate the festival’s concept of high energy sport, music and community into a bold visual language.

CLIENT

Football Victoria

Role

Designer

Service

Promotional design

Background

Design Solution

Offside is a reimagined soccer festival that transforms Gosch’s Paddock into a high‑energy cultural space where football, music and community collide. Built around a fast‑paced 7‑a‑side tournament, the event celebrates the grassroots level of the game. By pairing competition with live DJs, street food, giveaways and social zones, Offside shifts the traditional matchday experience into something more vibrant, youthful and festival‑driven.

The poster series establishes a bold and contemporary visual identity that reflects the festival’s fusion of football culture, music, and community energy. The design system is built around a strong typographic spine, with the vertical Offside logotype functioning as both a brand anchor and a directional device. Its skewed geometry and custom distortions reference the speed, tension, and unpredictability of the game, transforming type into a graphic expression of movement.

Imagery plays a dual role across the posters: stylised, grain‑treated player visuals communicate intensity and dynamism, while stadium photography grounds the event in Melbourne’s football landscape. This balance between expressive illustration and documentary realism reinforces the festival’s grassroots yet aspirational tone. A restrained monochrome palette, punctuated by sharp red accents, creates visual drama and maintains clarity, ensuring the posters remain impactful from a distance and legible at close range.

Negative space is used deliberately to balance the density of the imagery, creating rhythm and breathing room within the composition. The hierarchy prioritises essential event information ensuring accessibility without compromising aesthetics. Together, these decisions form a cohesive identity that captures the fast‑paced, competitive spirit of football while introducing a contemporary festival sensibility that feels fresh, energetic, and culturally relevant.

Huddle

A youth‑focused campaign that reflects the pressures teenage girls face in sport with the aim of creating awareness.The Huddle campaign is built around a simple but powerful idea: the mental pressures that push girls out of sport are real, common, and often invisible. Huddle uses softness, imperfection, and emotional clarity to open a conversation that young athletes can actually see themselves in.

A mental‑health campaign that uses game‑inspired visual language to reflect the pressure young adults face, making mental wellbeing feel approachable, relatable and easier to talk about.

MindField

The publication is designed as a disciplined editorial piece that mirrors the tensions in Lin’s article. I use a stable academic framework, wide margins, and a strict hierarchy to create clarity and breathing room around dense sociological content. This structure gives the book a controlled, institutional tone, which I deliberately contrast with moments of disruption to reflect the lived instability described in the research.

Throughout the book, abstract symbols and fragmented visual elements interrupt the clean layout at key thematic points. These aren’t illustrations; they act as conceptual markers that echo ideas of pressure and blurred boundaries between life and work. The result is a publication that holds two modes at once: ordered and unsettled. It functions as both a scholarly document and a designed artefact, using rhythm, space, and disruption to extend the meaning of the text.

The key objective of this design was to develop a cohesive visual identity for Lili Lin’s text that conveys the emotional impact of collapsing work–life boundaries through imagery, colour, and visual hierarchy.