Hay Festival unveils rebrand ahead of line-up announcement

Hay Festival has unveiled a major rebrand ahead of this year’s festival as director Peter Florence hints the 2019 line-up will have a European feel. 

Designed by Pentagram, the new brand design features a colourful tree with many branches represents a family of Hay Festival editions, covering the organisation’s various dimensions, geographies and channels.

Florence told The Bookseller: "We started working with Pentagram a while ago and they were the most inspiring and imaginative and they responded really well to the ideas of the festival. It was like having a total rethink of the festival really. I'm really happy with the design. We are piloting a couple of things this year in terms of stage design and how the branding design will play out across the site.

"The programme line-up will be a moment for us to make a clear statement of the ideas we will be exploring from Europe and some are profoundly local. All I can say for now is there's an awful lot about Europe and our neighbours this year."

The next festival edition, Hay Festival Wales, takes place from 23rd May to 2nd June 2019. The full programme will be announced on Tuesday 26th March and a handful of earlybird events are available to book online now, featuring Stacey Dooley, Robert Macfarlane, Leila Slimani, Anna Burns, Julia Donaldson, Michael Rosen and Sandi Toksvig.

The re-brand will be seen across Hay’s festivals, forums and special projects. 

Marina Willer, partner and designer at Pentagram, said: “We were delighted to be offered the opportunity to work with Hay Festival and to take on the challenge of creating a single visual framework for an organisation fixed in plurality. We set out to create a visual language and system to express more clearly the organisation’s activities and what connects them, creating an approach for the brand architecture that makes sense of their vibrant ecosystem of events, projects and vision, all under the invitation to ‘Imagine the World’.”

Cristina Fuentes la Roche, international director at Hay Festival, said: “This is a new look for a new Hay Festival era. It has been a pleasure working with Pentagram to build a brand architecture that reflects all we do and resonates internationally. Over the next 12 months we have some exciting new developments to announce, from new activities at our roots in Hay-on-Wye to exciting new off-shoots around the world, and look forward to doing so now in style.”