Hay Festival has today unveiled an international brand refresh, designed by Pentagram, to encompass its festivals, forums, special projects, digital player and Hay Festival Foundation.
Revealed ahead of next week’s Hay Festival Wales 2019 programme launch, the new identity is a rich visual system where a colourful tree with many branches represents a family of Hay Festival editions, covering the organisation’s various dimensions, geographies and channels.
Marina Willer, partner and designer at Pentagram, said: “We were delighted to be offered the opportunity to work with Hay Festival and to take on the challenge of creating a single visual framework for an organisation fixed in plurality. We set out to create a visual language and system to express more clearly the organisation’s activities and what connects them, creating an approach for the brand architecture that makes sense of their vibrant ecosystem of events, projects and vision, all under the invitation to ‘Imagine the World’.”
Cristina Fuentes la Roche, international director at Hay Festival, said: “This is a new look for a new Hay Festival era. It has been a pleasure working with Pentagram to build a brand architecture that reflects all we do and resonates internationally. Over the next 12 months we have some exciting new developments to announce, from new activities at our roots in Hay-on-Wye to exciting new off-shoots around the world, and look forward to doing so now in style.”
Bringing readers and writers together for a global series of sustainable events, Hay Festival is one of the world’s most recognisable cultural brands, reaching millions through its live events, projects and digital platforms annually.
Over the years, the world’s greatest writers, thinkers and performers have taken to the festival’s stages including Arthur Miller, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Arundhati Roy, Naomi Klein, Edward Said, Alice Walker, Hugh Masekela, Jimmy Carter, Seamus Heaney, Zadie Smith, Tom Stoppard, Nadine Gordimer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Martin Amis, Paul McCartney, Desmond Tutu, Jane Fonda, and Al Gore.
The next festival edition, Hay Festival Wales, takes place 23 May to 2 June 2019. While the full programme will be announced on Tuesday 26 March, a handful of earlybird events are online now, featuring Jimmy Carr, Stacey Dooley, Jared Diamond, Venki Ramakrishnan, Robert Macfarlane, Horatio Clare, Leila Slimani, Anna Burns, Markus Zusak, Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen, Sandi Toksvig; performances from The Waterboys and The Lost Words Spell Songs; and all-star performances of Diaries Live and Speeches Live. Meanwhile, the festival’s free Programme for Schools is open for booking now at hayfestival.org/schools.
Find out more about the brand refresh here.