Greenwich Book Festival is a multi-day literary festival hosted across the historic grounds of the Old Royal Naval College and the University of Greenwich.
The brief required an identity that could balance literary prestige with open civic accessibility. The festival needed to appeal to international authors, academic panels, and family audiences without adopting an institutional or academic aesthetic. The identity had to perform across distinct scales: from four-metre outdoor feather flags along the Thames riverfront to pocket-sized A3 concertina fold programmes and responsive digital timetables.
I rebuilt the identity around location-specific geometry and maritime heritage. The primary mark combines the silhouette of an open book with the lines of a river vessel. Custom vector architectural illustrations of the Old Royal Naval College and Cutty Sark anchor the festival in its World Heritage site setting, rendered with clean, single-weight linework to maintain clarity across print, screen, and fabric.
The colour system avoids the conventional monochrome palette of literary festivals in favour of five maritime-inspired tones: Naval Blue, Horizon Blue, Aquamarine, Sunrise Orange, and Salmon Pink. These functional colourways establish clear navigational cues across venue zones, genre tracks, and scheduling materials.
The editorial collateral was designed as a modular print system. The A3 festival programme folds down into a pocket format, structured around a strict typographic grid that accommodates complex schedules, speaker bios, and sponsor hierarchies. Environmental wayfinding—including outdoor feather flags and large-format PVC banners—was calibrated for maximum legibility across the open grounds of the naval college campus.
- Year
- 2018–2020
- Project No.
- 001
- Client
- University of Greenwich
- Discipline
- Brand Identity, Environmental Design, Editorial Design
- Role
- Lead Visual Communications Designer
- Production
- Illustrator, InDesign, custom vector architectural illustration, outdoor wayfinding, A3 folded print programme
