Painting or a build

What the Potamia carnival is

The carnival of a village on Thassos, run by the villagers themselves — not by a council, not by a company.

Every winter the village's groups build floats and write satirical sketches — about current affairs and politics, about local Thassos affairs, sometimes about history or the twelve gods — and take to the square on the last Sunday of carnival. It is organised by the «Dionysos» cultural association. It is not staged for tourists: it is a village making fun of itself — but anyone who turns up is in it.

Where

Potamia, Thassos

The parade

14 March 2027

Who

«Dionysos» Cultural Association

Colours

Three recognisable colours plus a neutral. The colours stay vivid on every step: the dark steps are deep, never dull. Every colour on the website is one of these.

What each step does: 100 shines on dark backgrounds · 200 fills the buttons · 300 is deeper, for a button being pressed · 400 is for text on light backgrounds · 500 is for emphasised text · 600 is near-black, with a hint of the colour — backgrounds only, never text.

One detail colour per carnival. Never two at once, never a new one. ΚΡΑΣΙ and ΝΙΟΝΙΟΣ never change.

The constant colours

These three are the carnival, every year. They are not substituted and not “corrected” to match something else.

The detail colour — one per carnival

Every carnival is always the purple and the red, plus ONE detail colour picked for the year. For Carnival '27 it is RAVE — the neon greens. The other three wait their turn: a future carnival may pick the amber, the electric pink or the cyan. Never two detail colours in the same year.

Paint, ink, fabric

Tap a swatch above to see its codes: RGB, CMYK and the nearest code in PMS, RAL and Vivechrom. Tap a code to copy it.

Click any value to copy it. RGB is for anything on a screen. CMYK is approximate — always ask your printer for a proof. The three codes underneath are the nearest sample in each colour chart: PMS (Pantone Solid Coated) for a printer or screen-printer, VIV for a Vivechrom shop, RAL for any other paint shop — Vitex, Kraft and Berling all mix RAL colours on the mixing machine. A faded code means nothing in that chart comes close. That is normal for our brightest colours, which only exist on a screen. For those, ask for a custom colour mixed to the hex code, or a fluorescent ink; paint never glows like a screen.

• If you can't find the exact colour, go darker. A washed-out purple looks like a different colour; a deeper one looks like the same purple in shade.
• RAVE lime and the brightest steps only look like this on a screen. No paint reaches them — ask for a fluorescent, or it will come out quieter.
• Outdoors, use matt or satin, never gloss. Gloss reflects the sky and the purple turns grey in photographs.
• Paint a test piece first and look at it in the light people will see it in — midday and floodlit at night are two different colours.

Our own symbols

The icons on the website are ready-made (Microsoft Fluent), except three we drew ourselves, because no ready-made set has a carnival float or a wine barrel. The mask is not an icon: it is the association's badge.

You will find them with the rest of the files, as SVG. They are single-colour and look right at any size, from very small (16px) to a wall.

Typography

Two voices: the association's serious one (Roboto Slab) and the carnival's festive one (Commissioner, all caps). Body copy is always Roboto Slab, in both.

Body copy is always Roboto Slab, in both voices. A poster whose small print is set in Commissioner reads as a nightclub flyer.

Three sizes per screen: one title, the text, and the small line for dates and details. A fourth size is a sign that the screen is trying to say two things — split it.

The alphabet, for copying by hand

If you are lettering with a brush on wood or cloth, these are the shapes. Keep them upright and tight.

Accents are the first thing lost when copying by eye. Greek all-caps takes no accent: «ΠΟΤΑΜΙΑΣ», «ΚΑΡΝΑΒΑΛΙ». Wherever the text is not all caps, the accent stays.

The logos

The association signs everything that lasts; the 2027 carnival signs the celebration. Choose below which logo you need. Every file can be downloaded further down.

The 2027 logo

Anything about this year’s carnival: posters, posts, tickets, t-shirts, the celebration's pages. Redrawn every year.

ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΣ

The association itself — letters, notices, the AGM, sponsor decks, anything that outlives one carnival.

Καρναβάλι Ποταμιάς

The carnival in general, with no year attached. Archive pages, the top of the website, permanent signs.

One signature per surface. If it is about the association, ΔΙΟΝΥΣΟΣ signs it; if it is about the 2027 carnival, 2027 does. They appear together only when the association publishes something about the 2027 carnival — and then in separate zones, never side by side.

The versions of the 2027 logo

For this year's logo there are only the versions its designer supplied. Download it from the files below, and write to us if you need another format.

Downloads

Every file, shown on the background it was made for. They are always the current ones.

All are SVG files. They open in Illustrator, Inkscape, Figma, Canva and Word, scale from a keyring to a banner without losing quality, and have no background of their own — the chequerboard in the preview means transparency. If you need PNG or EPS, write to us; don't enlarge a screenshot.

Free for any use that concerns or covers the carnival. For commercial use, ask the association first.

Practical notes, before you start

For brush work, outdoors, in February.

• Ask for RAL at the paint shop

  Every swatch gives the nearest RAL code. Vitex, Kraft and Berling all tint to RAL on the mixing machine; Vivechrom has its own code too.

• Purple first, over the whole surface

  The purple (ΝΙΟΝΙΟΣ) takes two thirds of the surface. Paint it first across everything and let it dry before anything goes on top.

• Red only as a box

  Red letters on purple cannot be read from two metres. Paint a red rectangle and letter it in white.

• Letter between two pencil lines

  The celebration's caps are upright and tight. Rule two pencil lines, top and bottom, and keep every letter between them.

• Matt, not gloss

  Gloss mirrors the sky and the purple photographs grey. Matt or satin, and two coats.

• Print the logo as a stencil

  Download the SVG, print it at the size you want across A3 sheets, cut it out and use it as a template. Do not draw it freehand.

Something not covered here?

If what you are making does not fit any of the above, or you need a file in another format, write to us. We answer, and we send what is needed.