Brand Identity for London Design Festival 2025
A typographic thread to unite London—does it actually connect anything?
Pentagram developed the 2025 identity for the London Design Festival, focusing on connection and collaboration across the city’s creative community. The system introduces a typographic thread motif symbolizing relationships between designers and districts, while maintaining the Festival’s iconic red. Flexible across print, digital, and motion, the identity continues Pentagram’s long-standing partnership with the event.
Insights- The core debate: the 2025 identity is positioned around “connection,” but it can read as a questionable concept execution—does a typographic “thread motif” truly communicate collaboration, or does it feel like a cosmetic layer over the existing look?
- Pentagram’s key design move is a typographic thread that visually links designers and London districts, turning “relationships across the city’s creative community” into a repeatable graphic device rather than a single static logo.
- The system deliberately maintains the London Design Festival’s iconic red, signaling continuity and brand recognition even while introducing a new motif—useful for an annual identity that must evolve without losing equity.
- Built to be flexible across print, digital, and motion, the identity behaves like a modular kit: the thread can scale, re-route, and animate, supporting urban, dynamic applications across varied festival touchpoints.
- This project extends Pentagram’s long-standing partnership with the Festival, suggesting the identity strategy is iterative year-to-year: evolve the visual language while keeping recognizability high for a major Arts & Culture event.
