Pentagram and the London Design Festival

A design festival's job is to showcase great design – so it should practice what it preaches. Since 2007 the design practice Pentagram have been creating each year's Festival identity

One of the achievements of the Festival is that it unifies a broad range of design activity - distributed throughout a huge metropolis - under a single banner. It does this with the help of some great design. In 2006 the Festival approached Pentagram designer Domenic Lippa to design the campaign for the following year's Festival. Lippa has been in charge of the team that designed the Festival's unique identity ever since.

"I gave a presentation for them and I did a board which was only red," recalls Lippa. "A double decker bus, an Arsenal player, all these iconic things that you associate with London that are red - much to my own disgust because I know John [Sorrell] and Ben [Evans] are both Arsenal fans and I'm a Chelsea fan."

Retaining the red "D" shaped logo designed by Vince Frost for the original 2003 Festival, Lippa took the logo's colour and applied it right across the Festival's identity. "I told them they should own the colour red," says Lippa.

Lippa had just arrived Pentagram; Ben Evans, director of the Festival, had long admired the work Lippa had done for his own practice Lippa Pearce, founded in 1990, as well as Lippa's work for the Typographic Circle. Since 2006 Lippa and his team at Pentagram have produced a remarkable series of identities that refresh the concept of the London Design Festival each year, satisfyingly solving the issue of how to brand a massive, London-wide, multi-disciplinary Festival.

"In a way," says Lippa, "the brief for the London Design Festival has never changed. It really is to create as much impact and stand-out originality each year. It's a festival that has a really broad audience, a really broad set of design disciplines and, given the size and sprawl of London, it actually has very few opportunities to get the message over so it has to make them count. And each year you've got to show that you've moved on, giving the Festival a fresh look..."

Pentagram also design for the Festival's "sub-brands"; including the London Design Medal, books and the identity for the London Design Embassy and the London Design Festival VIP Programme.

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