Glasgow Film Festival came to O Street in 2019 for a smart new look that would celebrate Glasgow and film. As fans and frequent patrons of our local independent cinema, Glasgow Film Theatre, we jumped at the chance to rebrand their beloved festival, and we’ve been working with them ever since.
This year, the festival celebrates its 20th edition! We created milestone icons and animations, retaining the fun and recognisable brand now synonymous with the Glasgow Film Festival in a unique, new celebratory colour palette. Building on the brand and framework we created initially.
GFF24 is the fourth annual campaign we’ve created for the Festival, adapting the core brand assets to align with the yearly theme.
GFF is considered one of the top film festivals in the country. The event programming brings together the highlights of independent and underground cinema—both global and local, alongside well-loved classics and emerging talent at various venues across Glasgow and Scotland. Our role was to encapsulate the festival personality by showcasing the city and its humour combined with film’s excitement, emotion and thrill.
We created an eye-catching modern brand underpinned with a minimal yet adaptable logo, strong brand guidelines and a growing library of unique icons and grids.
The trick was to create a recognisable visual approach that would keep campaigns fresh and impactful year after year. We centred the identity around a simple rectangular screen as a ‘window’ into cinema—creating a vibrant world of illustration that has evolved over the last four years.
In 2021, the GFF’s ‘Online at Home’ campaign featured visuals highlighting the playful juxtaposition between the glamour of cinema and watching movies in your PJs. The stay-at-home aspect of the festival opened up opportunities for making the most of social media applications. To deliver that, we created custom Instagram filters for an augmented reality experience of the festival.
2022 saw us adding to the ever-growing icon library to reflect some of the stand-out films and key genres in the festival, as well as some well-recognised landmarks. We took a 3D approach for 2023, creating a framework with icons that jump out of the page at you.
Come February each year, Glasgow is awash with print and digital posters. This ongoing vibrant evolution of the brand, with localised and personalised content communicating the festival’s global standing, helps brighten our dark winter days.
We developed easy-to-follow frames and grids in the initial campaign. Year on year, this has allowed us, and the GFF in-house team, to quickly create consistently branded applications, working modularly across multiple formats in both print and digital.
Elements of motion are woven through each campaign, offering another way to bring out the unique personality of the event. Ahead of GFF24, we created a playful animation recapping successes from the previous year and highlighting the Glasgow Film Festival story to date.
It’s been such a pleasure to create an identity which feels like a true celebration of cinema and brings audiences back time and time again to share in the experience!
