The archive · Design & Visual · Product decision · 2023
Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival 2023 grows its identity as one big tree of rural detail
For the festival's 5th edition in Xi'an's Huyi District, the identity grows village details into one living big-tree image
Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival
What it had to solve
The 5th Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival was held in Huyi District, Xi'an, and was built on the cultural character, food crops, living folk music, local conditions and village scenery of the Guanzhong region. Its visual identity had to make the beauty of these rural details visible rather than burying them under a generic festival look.
How it works
The Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival is a village festival in Huyi District, Xi'an, that draws its programme from the cultural character, food crops, living folk music, local conditions and scenery of the Guanzhong countryside. For its fifth edition in 2023 it needed a visual identity that could carry that much specific rural texture — and avoid turning a place-based festival into a generic countryside cliché.
The concept treated the festival itself as a "big tree" and "the beauty of rural details" as its seed. The identity grows continuously from that seed: wind-blown ears of wheat, mature and swaying grapes, ancient millstones, scattered mountains, aging benches and local words all appear in a single visual image of vitality, so the festival's mark reads as living Guanzhong landscape rather than a logo.
The result was an identity system in which every element is traceable to the region the festival serves — crops and tools visitors actually see, words they actually speak. D&AD archived the project under Graphic Design, placing the fifth edition's village-based visual language in the awards archive.
Why it lands
- One growing "big tree" gave a unifying structure to many unrelated details, so the identity stayed one image rather than a collage.
- Every element came from the festival's actual context — wheat, grapes, millstones, benches and local words — so the mark could not be mistaken for another region's.
- It treated the festival and the landscape as one organism: the event is the tree, and the countryside's beauty is what makes it grow.
What it did
The festival received a visual system in which the region's own textures — crops, tools, landscape, furniture and language — became the event's identity rather than decoration. D&AD archived the work under Graphic Design.
What you can take
When a festival is about a place, build the identity from that place's own details, and let one growing metaphor — the tree — hold crops, stones and words in a single image.
Since then
The identity was made for and used by the fifth Guanzhong Mangba Arts Festival in 2023 and was archived by D&AD under Graphic Design. The archive page records no attendance or engagement figures, so the case rests on the concept: a festival about a place can make that place's details the whole visual system.
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