The Warehouse Project’s logo stripes are a color code spelling its name
Founders Sam Kandel and Richard McGinnis look back at 20 years of WHP posters: the color-coded logo, glow-in-the-dark ink, a metal frame set on fire for a tombstone flyer, and the venues behind them.
The Warehouse Project turns 20 this year, and founders Sam Kandel and Richard McGinnis have gone back through its posters with Mixmag. The logo is the oldest constant. Paul Hemmingfield designed it ahead of the 2006 debut at Boddington’s Brewery in Manchester, and its stripes are a color code that spells out “The Warehouse Project.”
The 2006 season announcement introduced a new format: a run of parties brought together as a series. At the time, McGinnis recalls, superclubs like Cream and Sankeys ran weekly nights rather than large-scale events. The 2008 artwork introduced the tagline “For 12 weeks, the city is ours” and was reused again and again. Kandel calls it “the most iconic image” of the project.
For 2010, Kandel’s friend Chris Cairns made battery-powered light boxes, and the team carried massive letters to the tops of buildings around Manchester and shot the campaign on camera. The calendars were printed on the back of the photographs, and the heads logo on the flyer used green ink that glowed. In 2011, Cairns built a metal frame and set it on fire for a flyer meant to feel like a tombstone.
Store Street, where WHP moved in 2007, hosted 10 seasons. Artists came in through a back stairwell in a box in the car park that McGinnis likens to a Tardis, and DJ Koze’s agent told the founders Koze would never play for them again, calling it an unsafe venue. At Victoria Warehouse, the 2012 campaign used a mirror image to signal doubled capacity and borrowed from Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne artwork. Kandel calls the two years there among the hardest in WHP’s history, and the party went back to Store Street in 2014.
Depot Mayfield came in 2019. To draw people in, the team took over billboards across cities such as Leeds with the line “Destination Manchester.” For the 2023 Rotterdam edition, the founders flew from Liverpool to look at a warehouse and were stopped by police while scouting it.
This year’s anniversary lineup includes Enzo and Luciano, who McGinnis says has not played for WHP in about four to five years. Kandel says another 20th anniversary show is planned for later this year.
