Forward Festival’s identity is a travelling circus that never resets

The Brand Identity: Forward Festival has been bringing people together since 2015, travelling between Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna with a programme of talks, workshops and a speaker line-up that features both globally recognised names and rising talents. Graz-based studio Zwupp has designed the identity for over a decade, a run that has since settled into a cumulative system that evolves annually. © Fabian Brennecke The 2026 edition makes that approach explicit, as it’s deliberately assembled like a series of components from the festival’s recent years.

The ‘swipe’ behaviour that Zwupp pulled from Instagram in 2023 and the 3D, GIF-like visuals of 2025 return, layered into a deliberate mash-up and held in place by the 45° slant of GT Planar – the Grilli Type font that has been present since 2022. © Alex Heuvink © Nils Leon Brauer In the early years, the Wiener Werkstätte served as the central reference, particularly its treatment of design as a holistic system, which Zwupp set out to translate into the here and now.

“We reinterpreted the typical WW artists’ monograms as speaker monograms – developing a WW-inspired typeface specifically for this purpose,” explain Stefan Joch, Lena Wurm and Andreas Putz from Zwupp. “We reimagined illustrations from old postcards, used the textile patterns of Josef Hoffmann and Kolo Moser as stylistic elements, and adapted motifs from stained glass windows, incorporating them into the timetable.” A black-and-white typographic mosaic poster referenced the Werkstätte’s tile graphics in 2024, though as the design has grown more typographic and reduced, the lineage lives in the conceptual thinking rather than the visual referen

ces alone. The turning point came in 2022, when Grilli Type released GT Planar. The typeface captured the festival’s premise of moving forward so completely that its 45° angle became the visual anchor for the whole identity. From 2023, Zwupp stopped designing from scratch each year, working instead with a continuously evolving system in which the principle stays constant while its expression changes. The diagonal now runs throughout. “We use the diagonal as a stylistic element in the transitions of our animations,” the team explains.

“There are also applications – such as the location plan – where we incorporate the diagonal into the typographic layout.” In static work, bleed and cropping push the communication beyond the edges of the format, and elements are frequently rotated to keep the layouts in motion. “We believe that GT Planar has brought a strong sense of consistency to the festival’s design – making it feel like a more established event than in the earlier years, when our communication was perhaps wilder and less anchored.” Around that typographic anchor sits a pragmatic set of rules.

Black-and-white forms the unifying base, with each city carrying its own accent colour – applied to social media posts when content relates to a single city, and kept away from print almost entirely. Speakers, cities and categories are communicated through a bubble aesthetic that emerged “as a counterweight to the rather loud 45° Black” cut of GT Planar.

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The article discusses a unique approach to brand identity that balances innovation and tradition, which is significant for brand strategy professionals looking for adaptable design solutions.