Manipulate Festival 2025 Identity
Above is a poster that forms the basis of an identity that I designed for Manipulate Festival 2025, Edinburgh’s international festival of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre, bringing the very best of international and Scottish work to audiences across Edinburgh and beyond. This is the third time that I have worked with Manipulate Arts, the organiser of the festival.
Unlike in previous years, when the design featured different images from festival performances across a series of posters, this iteration used a single key image. The festival commissioned an illustrator, Yifei Xiang, to produce an illustration to encapsulate the ideas and themes behind the festival. I collaborated with the illustrator from an early stage to make sure that the format of the illustration fitted the template that I had set up, which – in order to save costs – was based on the design of last year’s poster.
Working with a palette of colours taken from Yifei’s illustration I developed a design for the poster that used a coloured gradient background that connected to the gradients that appear in the illustrator’s work. I faded the illustration in to the background colour with the Manipulate Festival logo layered over the top as in the previous year’s poster.
The layout and design of the poster was then adapted for other marketing material that I designed, including: a printed programme guide; press advertisements; posters of different sizes and shapes; and digital assets. I am pleased to say that this rational approach to designing the marketing material – working with the illustrator at the commissioning stage, and using the basic template from the previous year – meant that the design of the marketing material came within budget, yet still produced a distinct suite of materials to showcase the festival.
Below is the Manipulate Festival 2025 programme guide which uses a variation of the design of the poster as a front cover alongside a gradient background taken from the poster design with colours from Yifei Xiang’s illustration. In order to fit a lot of information in a small space, the typography sets up a hierarchy of information for the various events of the festival including use of symbols to indicate wheelchair access etc. The programme guide is 8 pages, double gatefold, folded to A5, it is printed on an uncoated paper.
Below are some of the other assets that I designed for the festival including digital screen posters, vinyls, and press advertisements, showing how the original design was adapted for different formats, sizes and shapes and for different types of information.
