Sydney Festival picks Alphabet Studio

Alphabet Studio’s being appointed as design agency by Sydney Festival could be considered a significant win. It’s a major piece of business and the pitch process is particularly rigorous.

Alphabet Studio is the first agency to have won the pitch twice in a row. Sydney Festival chooses a new agency every three to four years to coincide with the tenure of each festival director, a tradition that has been followed for more than forty years.

Four years ago, Alphabet won the pitch to work with Sydney Festival’s Belgian festival director, Lieven Bertels. It has just won the pitch to work with Sydney Festival’s new festival director, Wesley Enoch.

Says Tina Walsberger, head of marketing and customer services: “Alphabet demonstrated a solid understanding of the challenges unique to the Festival brief, and an ability to rethink the brand in a way that retains a solid grasp of the challenges of rolling out the Festival campaign each year, while injecting a whole new energy to the upcoming look tone and feel reflective of incoming festival director Wesley Enoch’s vision for the 2017 Sydney Festival.”

Says Paul Clark, co-director of Alphabet Studio: “A new festival director means a whole new agenda and a whole new tender. We were excited to make the final cut of amazing agencies who submitted proposals to the open tender. Making it through the initial round and then being invited to pitch as the incumbent was a big deal for us. The odds were against us, as we were the existing agency competing with fresh minds and creativity. Being in the mix of esteemed agencies, the successful appointment for the contract has been an enormous highlight for us at Alphabet.

“What made the win even sweeter was that several key assets from our previous work have been retained and will be reinterpreted and reconstructed into the new work.”

Sydney Festival’s brand is reinvented to reflect the vision of each festival director, and everything from signage and digital communications to spatial design within key venues must also align with that vision. Bertels and Enoch are expected to have quite different approaches to, and interpretations of, what makes and defines a Festival. This is likely to be reflected in their programming choices and their relationship to the social landscape of the city they are working with.

Much of Alphabet’s work for the festival over the last four years has had a classic elegance to it, albeit with quirky typography used to underscore the excitement of the festival.

The new work will be an arresting and bold reimagining of the festival brand. One of its aims is to communicate the excitement of the festival so vibrantly it is almost palpable.

That work will begin to appear across Sydney later in the year when the 2017 marketing campaign begins.