Three founders, two halves and a debut in June 1994.

Sónar was founded in Barcelona in 1994. English Wikipedia says it began as the “Festival of Advanced Music and Multimedia Art” and names three founders: the music journalist Ricard Robles and the musicians and visual artists Enric Palau and Sergio Caballero, whose given name also appears as Sergi. Wikipedia describes the festival today as one dedicated to music, creativity and technology, and says it has been divided into two parts since its inception: Sónar by Day and Sónar by Night.

The debut edition ran on 2, 3 and 4 June 1994. Wikipedia places the daytime programme at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona and the night programme at the Apolo club, and lists performers including Holger Czukay, Mixmaster Morris, Laurent Garnier, Sven Väth, Atom Heart and Trans Global Underground. That year also included a Record Fair and a Technology Fair, which Wikipedia calls the forerunner of today’s professional congress.

Palau explained the founding idea to Complex in an interview published on 11 June 2018, as the festival reached its twenty-fifth year. “We started Sónar with the ambition to create an international meeting point devoted to creativity and technology,” he said, adding that the thinking grew deeper and more complex from there. Complex described the three founders as friends who came together to build that meeting point in Barcelona, and called the event an advanced music and multimedia art convention. He compared the Sónar timetable to a film that starts quietly, builds to a drama and a crescendo, and ends with the calm after the storm, and said the team plans the order of artists closely with that arc in mind.

From the Apolo and the Poble Espanyol to two trade-fair halls.

Both halves of the festival have changed venue several times. Wikipedia says Sónar by Night moved in its second year to the Poble Espanyol on Montjuïc, where it stayed in 1995 and 1996, then to the Mar Bella sports pavilion in 1997, and in 2001 to the Fira Gran Via exhibition grounds in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, a venue that allowed large concerts with a strong audiovisual component. Sónar by Day spent years around the MACBA contemporary art museum before moving in 2013 to the Fira Montjuïc halls at Plaça d’Espanya. Wikipedia names the daytime stages as SonarHall, SonarDome, the SonarComplex auditorium, SonarXS and the outdoor SonarVillage, which it says is presented by Estrella Damm and known for its artificial grass. In 2019, it says, the Barcelona edition moved from June to July.

The 2013 move also reshaped the professional strand. Wikipedia says the fair format had gradually moved away from trade stands towards art installations, film screenings, talks and conferences, and that it was reimagined as Sónar+D, a three-day congress on creativity, technology and business running alongside Sónar by Day. A networking day for delegates was added from 2017.

The name has travelled. Wikipedia dates the festival’s opening foray abroad to London in 2002 and lists later events in cities including Chicago, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Hamburg, Bogotá, New York, Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong, with an Istanbul edition from 2017 and a Reykjavik edition at the Harpa concert hall. In 2023, the festival’s thirtieth year, Wikipedia records editions in Barcelona, Lisbon and Istanbul.

Ownership changed in 2018, when, as Mixmag reported on 13 October 2025, the founders sold their majority stake to Superstruct Entertainment; the same report, citing La Vanguardia, said Palau, Robles and Caballero had stepped back from managing the festival and that the Belgian promoter François Jozic had become chief executive.

A campaign image that has never been a flyer.

Some festivals own a single field or park; others are spread across a whole city and borrow its concert halls, theatres, churches and squares for a few weeks. The second kind cannot rely on stage architecture to carry its identity, because the buildings belong to someone else and keep their own names, signs and colours. Its identity has to travel instead: on banners hung from lamp posts, on window cards in shops and cafés, on a printed programme that visitors carry from venue to venue, and on a central box office or information point that becomes the one permanent address. The printed programme often does more of the work than any logo. It sets the order of events, the way dates and venues are written and the tone of the descriptions, and for many visitors it is the object they keep afterwards.

A single-site festival faces the opposite task. It controls every structure, so it can build its scenery from scratch each year, and many such events choose an annual theme or story that governs the main stage, the campaign artwork and the merchandise for one edition before being replaced. When a festival of this kind licenses its name to editions in other countries or seasons, the theme can be reused, adapted or rewritten for the new site, while the name and mark stay fixed. Sponsors add another layer, sometimes lending their names to stages, tents or the event itself. For designers the practical question is the same in both cases: which elements must stay constant so that the name is recognised in any setting, and which can be allowed to change with the venue, the year or the partner.

Parents with record boxes, a footballer and two ghosts.

Sónar’s look changes every year, and it has had one author since the start. Wikipedia says the festival’s visual image has been directed by Sergio Caballero since the 1994 edition, describes that image as an intrinsic part of the festival’s identity, and notes that Sónar keeps an archive of each year’s imagery on its website. In the 2018 Complex interview, Palau dated the campaign approach to 1997. That campaign, he said, was about moving from feeling synthetic to being organic, and its pictures showed old people carrying vinyl DJ boxes; the people were the founders’ own parents, and Palau said his mother and father were stopped at later festivals by visitors asking for photographs. He called it the idea of anti-celebrity. He also recalled the effort of bringing Diego Maradona into a campaign, saying it was complicated to reach him but that, in the end, Maradona took part out of a sense of allegiance with Sónar.

Time Out Barcelona, writing on 22 March 2018, described Caballero as one of the three directors of Sónar alongside Robles and Palau, and said he had created the dark and explosive world of the festival and its transgressive spirit. The magazine was previewing No Flyers, No Posters, a twenty-fifth-anniversary exhibition at the Tecla Sala art centre in L’Hospitalet that ran from 24 May to 23 June 2018, with about fifty pieces across ten rooms. It said the show was conceived as one large installation of videos, sculptures, documents and photographs rather than a display of conventional media. Among the figures it named from past campaigns were the Telekinetic Twins, the founders’ parents from 1997, the cast of the short film La Distancia for the 2012 edition, and a pair of ghosts from Finisterrae, Caballero’s debut feature film, dated 2010. The design studio Mucho says it designed the companion book, 25 years of Sonar Image, with Caballero, as part of the retrospective curated by Amelie López-Aranguren.

The anniversary year added one more unusual piece of communication. Wikipedia says that for its twenty-fifth edition the festival sent short pieces of music by artists close to Sónar towards the exoplanet GJ273b, known as Luyten b, transmitting in October 2017 and May 2018 from the EISCAT antenna in Tromsø, Norway, with the Catalonia Institute of Space Studies and METI. Palau told Complex the project took a year to organise with two scientific teams and that each artist was asked for a ten-second piece.

For a design guide, Sónar shows how a festival can keep a stable name and a two-part structure while handing its picture to a single artist who reinvents it every year. Compare Estrella Damm, the Barcelona beer whose name Wikipedia attaches to the SonarVillage stage, and Tomorrowland, the Belgian electronic-music festival. For this guide we use signal red, snowfield grey and club black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sónar’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.