Illuminate Festival
In its inaugural year, Illuminate Adelaide had a challenge before them; to create an innovative and unique festival, while also cementing themselves as a serious player among South Australian events with more than 60 years history.
The Challenge
lluminate Adelaide was a brand new, major event, needing a brand identity that could connect its new and innovative content with a crowd that believes it’s seen it all before.
In its inaugural year, Illuminate Adelaide had set itself a goal of disrupting South Australians’ expectations of what a major event could be. In August 2020 – 11 months out from the event – Illuminate Adelaide creative directors, Rachael Azzopardi and Lee Cumberlidge had assembled a team and a program
that could absolutely pull it off. The only thing missing was…literally everything else.
KWPX was tasked with taking the name, the ideas, the content, and the passion of Illuminate Adelaide, and organising it into a brand architecture that could stand strong alongside South Australian events with more than 60 years of equity, while also communicating a different proposition.
The Solution
Building a brand like Illuminate Adelaide from scratch requires both delicacy and strength. We worked closely with founders Rachael Azzopardi, Lee Cumberlidge and their leadership team, and developed a consistent brand personality and proposition for Illuminate Adelaide that would become the basis of their communication strategy across advertising and social media.
This brand architecture was then given to our design team with a brief to tell the story of humanity’s experience of technology.
The basis of this integrated brand is a custom typeface and responsive grid system that allows Illuminate Adelaide to flex and fill the spaces and communication challenges they face online, in print, on the street, and across a notable building façade or two.
The Result
Illuminate Adelaide experienced exponential growth with the reveal of its program and brand identity online. Social media was a critical touchpoint for the event with Instagram jumping to 12,000 followers, and Facebook to 20,000 followers in the six months between launching the brand and program and the event itself.
A key highlight was seeing Illuminate Adelaide’s brand archetype of ‘the lover’ come to life with their use of the green heart emoji on social (💚 ) throughout the event period. The ‘lover’ was further brought to life when the team shared a marriage proposal that occurred during one of their events.
Creative Director, Rachael Azzopardi knows the brand identity was a critical milestone in realising her ambition for Illuminate Adelaide, saying:
“the reaction to the brand from all of our stakeholders and festival goers was really positive. There’s no doubt in my mind the brand helped us launch with a bang.”
Our Illuminate Adelaide work has picked up a couple of awards for typography and brand identity as well.
