LDF22 Graphic Identity by Pentagram

Since 2007, Lippa and his team have produced the visual language for each iteration of the Festival - responding to, and anticipating, trends in design and typography.

The Festival's colour theme of white on red has been consistent through the years, with Pentagram adapting each brief to produce distinctive visual identities to ensure that each edition of the Festival stands alone. ’Red is the colour of London; the buses, the phone boxes and the pillar boxes ... the brief was just to make it impactful, and in a way that's never changed each year.’

For 2022, an anniversary edition of London Design Festival, the idea of 100s of people coming together to create the 20 years of the brand was was the starting point. ‘Our community is wide and broad, and there are loads of disciplines, large and small,’ Lippa says. ‘It’s about that in community working together and moving together.’

While the brief hasn’t changed over the years, Lippa mentions that ‘the environment of our society’ has. During the LDF First Look, he describes how technology has impacted and evolved the graphic design industry, and this has been used in the identity for the first time with the animated quality of the visual which sees the numbers of 2 and 0 ebbing and flowing.

’We wanted to celebrate this milestone with a solution that supports its success,’ Lippa muses, and the experience isn’t too different to the bustle of the Festival itself, like ’flock of designers weaving through London!’