If you happened to be darting through Amsterdam Centraal, wandering the streets of Barcelona, or sitting on a bus on your way into Leeds on 30 January, it’s likely your head would have been turned by motion design. Starting in 2019, and on a biannual basis since, DEMO Festival – founded by Studio Dumbar/DEPT® – has taken up the unlikely home of public screens. Creating a one-of-a-kind design festival in the process, for 24 blissful hours, digital out-of-home partners offer up their screens, simply but impactfully, to support an ever-growing community of motion designers.
What began as a 24-hour takeover of Amsterdam train station screens in 2019 grew to 5,000 screens and a global call-out in 2022. However, the 2025 festivities took a cities approach. Expanding across 15 cities and seven countries, from Düsseldorf to Cardiff and Vancouver, purposeful attendees (or just passersby) could watch the work of over 350 designers featured this year.
This free, completely open-to-the-public motion design festival has gradually grown in size and stature since the first edition six years ago. In Studio Dumbar creative director Liza Enebis’ mind, DEMO 2019 “was more about getting to know each other”, she tells It’s Nice That. At that time, the motion design scene was still finding its feet: “A lot of people were familiar with each other’s work online, but not really in real life,” continues Liza, “or had seen their own work, or others’, on such a scale – as we were confined to our phones and laptop screens.” The increased demand for motion during and post-lockdowns then heavily influenced the 2022 edition. “The gathering was significant in another sense, with a lot of new people joining who had spent the two (pandemic) years learning new skills,” says Liza. But this year, “2025 really felt like we can truly call it a community.”