Thaxted Festival
The brief
Thaxted’s prestigious annual music festival, located in the superb acoustics of Thaxted Church dates back to 1916. Originating from Gustav Holst’s Whitsun Festival, the event has grown and adapted over the years to include many music genres, appealing to new generations and a wider audience of music lovers. Thaxted Festival required an updated brand, website and supporting marketing to connect more successfully with their diverse audience.
A timeless brand
Thaxted Festival needed a brand that celebrated it’s heritage and the craft of live music, whilst also feeling more modern and relevant to their new found wider audience. Jasmine used a sans serif typeface in the brand mark design to create a modern feel, which sits alongside a monogram icon. This mark has a distinct ‘signature’ feel - a nod towards excellence, craft and historical significance. The brand as a whole needed to feel ‘classic’ without too much emphasis on ‘classical’, so Jasmine used the stave as a visual starting point. The warped shape of the stave brings a sense of modernity to the brand, and mimics the same angles and paths as the ‘signature’ icon.
Classic design
The brand was extended into many supporting materials, including website, posters, adverts, leaflets and programmes. The stave brand asset features heavily in the design, it works perfectly as an overlay but also as a container for imagery; this flexibility allows the brand to be visually consistent without being repetitive. The variability of the brand assets also gives the style longevity, with some simple image changes as each year passes to keep the branding feeling fresh and new.
