Meridian

Meridian is a contemporary arts festival held annually across multiple venues in a mid-sized UK city. After five years of changing creative direction and inconsistent branding — each year's festival effectively starting from scratch visually — the organisation wanted a system that could hold its identity across years while allowing enough flexibility for each edition to feel genuinely new.

The additional complexity was the wayfinding challenge: festival-goers navigating between 11 venues across a 2km radius needed a signage system that worked in everything from a window vinyl to a 3m banner, was reproducible on a tight budget, and could be installed and struck by a small volunteer team.

We built the identity around a typographic system rather than a fixed logomark — the word MERIDIAN set in a variable-weight display typeface with the tracking and weight adjusted each year, allowing the festival to feel editorially fresh while remaining recognisable. A secondary motif — a broken horizontal line suggesting a horizon — provides consistency across editions and works at any scale.

The palette is deliberately high-contrast: festival yellow, black, and white with no half-tones, allowing all printed materials to be produced by local print shops without specialist equipment. The wayfinding system uses a numbered venue system with a consistent icon set, reproduced on A2 posters, window flags, and pavement stickers — all designed to be produced from a single PDF template that the festival team updates annually.