Brighton Festival built its 2019 identity on guest director Rokia Traoré's silhouette

The three-week arts festival has invited an internationally recognised guest director every year since 2009, and each year Johnson Banks keeps the hand-drawn 'F' logo it designed in 2013 while changing the lead image around it.

An illustrated silhouette of the guest director's distinctive profile with the festival's hand-drawn white 'F' inside it, ringed by African hibiscus flowers

Simon Prades drew Traoré's side profile as a silhouette celebrating 'growth, movement and coming together'; a white serif 'F' with 'Brighton Festival' set vertically inside it sits within the head, with slab-serif Lubalin Graph carrying the wider branding, surrounded by African hibiscus flowers in orange, yellow and red.

No metrics. The identity rolled out across bags and t-shirts, the website and social media, festival signage, brochures and print ahead of the 4-26 May 2019 festival, and the 'F' mark had by then become the signifier locals read as the festival approaching.

In February 2019 Brighton Festival unveiled an identity for its 2019 edition built around the image of its guest director, Malian musician Rokia Traoré, whose vision for the event was to inspire and empower individuals and communities to meet, listen and pass on stories to the next generation.

Designed by studio Johnson Banks with illustrator Simon Prades, the identity turns an image of Traoré's head looking sideways into a silhouette — she has a unique profile, and the studio wanted to make the most of it. Illustrator Prades drew it as a celebration of 'growth, movement and coming together'.

The festival's hand-drawn white serif 'F' — originally designed by Johnson Banks in 2013 and reinterpreted each year — sits inside the silhouette with 'Brighton Festival' set vertically within it, surrounded by graphic African hibiscus flowers in orange, yellow and red, with Lubalin Graph as the main typeface. The same system links the festival to the matching 'D' identity Johnson Banks designed for Brighton Dome.

The guest director's own silhouette 'clearly marks it as her festival', as Michael Johnson put it, making each year's edition collectible.

Keeping the 'F' constant across six years of identities preserves local recognition while everything around it changes.

An illustrative rather than photographic treatment evoked the qualities the brief asked for.

The hibiscus ring nods to the director's heritage without turning the identity into costume.

A fixed mark plus a yearly variable — here the guest director's own profile — keeps an annual event fresh without rebuilding recognition from scratch.

The identity rolled out across merchandise, signage, brochures, print, web and social ahead of the festival, which ran 4-26 May 2019; Michael Johnson hoped to extend it to 'weird and wonderful' places such as walls and telephone boxes.