Overview
Davos Festival is a classical music festival featuring the cream of young musicians from around Europe. Held in the mountains of Davos, Switzerland annually, our identity was required to reflect the contemporary spirit of the festival as well as the magic of the place.
The Challenge
After almost thirty years of successfully running Davos Festival, falling attendance numbers identified a critical need to attract a new audience amongst younger classical music fans in Switzerland and abroad. The current brand identity and visual language was deemed too conservative and was not resonating with the newly defined target market. The new festival identity needed to be striking enough to stand-out in the market, whilst accompanied by a visual theme that connected with the new, younger audience and changed each year to reflect changing festival themes.
Concept Development
Our concept development work produced three strong directions that were presented with both proposed brand mark and festival theme in poster format.
The brand identity element of the second concept was selected and developed for the festival brand identity. The brand mark included a variation that marked the 29th anniversary of the festival, as well as a pull-out brand lock-up featuring the ‘twin peaks’ element and 29th anniversary numbering.
The Solution
A clean, contemporary and strong type mark provided the perfect anchor-point for evolving festival theme design. Our brand mark was based-upon the twin peaks of the Davos mountains which became the feature ‘A’ letter element in the Festival type mark. A second version of the mark featured a number ‘locked-up’ with the mark to delineate the 29th holding of the festival.
How we helped Davos
Brand identity, stationery, brochure design, festival environmental graphics, digital and promotion campaign design.
