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The University of Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas is a world class, innovative event that attracts huge name speakers and as has a global profile. The District’s brief was to redevelop the festival’s communications to support the gravitas of the event and project it’s reputation upward.

One of three related festivals, the branding required an approach that would provide each festival with a unique personality while integrating them into a recognisable whole. By developing an abstract shape from the relating letterforms we created marks that implicitly articulated the unconventional, challenging and thought-provoking nature of the festivals.

Each mark carried its own distinct personality through a bespoke colour palette and specific shape, designed with the flexibility to scale up from small logos and watermarks to large image holders which could act dynamically on the printed page. The resulting visual language has been used coherently throughout the Festival of Ideas brochures, programmes and flyers. The shape even lent itself to a distinctive event invitation, which enabled the recipient to peel off perforated edges to reveal the associated shape.