Since our rebrand of Brighton Festival in 2013 almost every year we have also designed the main visual theme, which takes its annual cue from each year’s guest director.
For 2019’s Festival, the director is Malian singer, songwriter and guitarist, Rokia Traoré. Her choices, guests and overall curation will explore the themes of identity, movement and humanity particularly in African culture and histories.
From the very first briefing meetings, we were keen to use her very powerful profile in the designs, to clearly mark it as her festival. Rokia’s aim is to inspire and empower individuals to make change and to become artists and activists in their own right – as evidenced by her Foundation Passarelle project in the Malian capital, Bamako.
We worked in collaboration with illustrator Simon Prades to bring Rokia’s profile to life, using the layering of native flowers to form a striking silhouette that is a celebration of growth, movement and the ‘coming together’ that the festival represents.
The campaign imagery is branded with the Brighton ‘F’ identity and appears over a wide variety of applications, from posters to t-shirts, bags and environmental signage.
The Festival launches this week and runs from the 4th to the 26th of May.
Read about our Festival identities from previous years and our parallel rebranding of Brighton Dome.
