For Reading and Leeds Festival design, Festival Republic (headed up by the highly respected Melvin Benn) commissioned us to create a new logo and brand identity to herald a new direction for the world famous Festivals. Our challenge was to create an overall identity with a strong, bold and fresh feel – with a youthful, rejuvenated yet focused personality – and be highly recognisable and symbolic of what the Festivals stand for.

The look and feel needed to appeal to the younger festival goer, without being patronising or tricky, to be defiant and confident to represent the rock heritage but also mindful that the festival was making a move to incorporate new genres such as Indie, Alternative and Dance.

We created our own bespoke typeface, which has then been ‘distressed’, and created a graphic language with arrows representing Reading – pointing south, and Leeds – pointing north. The entire logo runs vertically to emphasise this but vertical placement also sets it apart from many other festival promotions. The yellow/red colour scheme of the old logos were key signifiers, so we ensured those remained an important part of the rebrand which incorporated logo, colour schemes, visual language, templates for posters, adverts and stage scrims plus an overall style guide which enabled Festival Republic to roll out the detailed designs themselves.

More examples of Form’s work for Festival branding and design can be seen with Latitude, V Festival, Taste Festival.
We were interviewed by AIGA (the USA’s professional association for design) about the work involved in capturing the personality of the Festival experience in this interview.