Connect Festival: rebranding a landmark Christian festival

Following our evolution of the Commission group visual brand we were tasked with rebranding their landmark festival, Westpoint. After 10 years Westpoint was changing location and starting a new chapter with a new name: Connect Festival.

Commission wanted the festival branding to be an offshoot of the new Commission identity to ensure festival-goers and congregants would recognise the alliance between the festival and the group, but it also needed its own distinctive identity. Although the festival attracts thousands of families each year, Commission was keen to transform the visual brand in order to attract a younger audience of 20-30 year olds; so the core challenge was to uproot the festival’s corporate ‘AGM’ style and transform it into something aspirational and cool. Crucially, the new visual brand and assets needed to be designed and packaged so that Commission’s in-house design team could continue to create brand assets once we had delivered the rebrand.

While it would fall underneath the Commission umbrella, the group wanted the Connect Festival identity to pay tribute to its convivial atmosphere so we introduced playful, hand painted graphical components to the festival logo, breaking up the blocky font with distinctive textural shapes. The suite of hand painted shapes extends beyond the logo with bold strokes housing brochure titles and textured shapes adding dimension to design collateral. Harnessing the updated colour palette from the new Commission brand – which previously resembled a rainbow – we began combining the unique colours with Connect Festival’s vibrant photography to develop guidelines and ideas for engaging and consistent brand assets.

The Commission team are delighted with the evolved group brand, which has now been rolled out across online and traditional channels. They’re extremely proud of the new Connect Festival identity, which will launch ahead of the upcoming festival in August 2020 and hopefully play a role in attracting Commission’s target audience of 20-30 year olds. The Commission and Connect Festival brand guidelines are already proving invaluable to their in-house designers, giving them a set of tools that can be used by anyone in the organisation to create consistent material.