Sydney Festival launches its 2017 campaign and pop palette brand refresh via Alphabet Studio

Having just celebrated 40 years of bringing cultural and arts events to Sydney shores, Sydney Festival marks 2017 with a new festival director (director, writer and actor Wesley Enoch), an abundance of national and international works, and a new look.

With each appointment of a new festival director, Sydney Festival invites studios to pitch creative to define and represent the new vision for the festival. Alphabet Studios won the creative tender.

Early in the creative development Enoch emphatically stated “I am a maker” and it is from this, that Alphabet took its creative cues.

A festival made by a maker. A festival inviting all to be makers. A festival to make your own.

Integral to the brief was to retain the essence of the brand. Rethink, retool, reimagine it whilst retaining its integrity. Alphabet did so by taking the existing brand font and re building it – pulling it apart and reassembling, creating and customising a bespoke typeface for the Festival. Shifting and reshaping into various forms across multiple applications, the graphic becomes a metaphor for connections, reinvention, interpretation, energy and the unexpected.

The Festival is about people and for people. Combining a pop palette with a series of beautiful portraits representing audience diversity, a series of eclectic campaign images define the immersive experience of the Festival and the people who love it.  

A series of 8 festival brochure covers represent this diverse selection of Sydneysiders and festival-goers.

Conceptualised, art directed and developed by Alphabet and working with Festival team, 2017 merge all the features of what makes Sydney Festival integral to Sydney in Summer.

Client: Sydney Festival

Animation: Finlay Downes­