About Nottdance
Nottdance is a Nottingham-based dance festival taking place regularly since the 1980s. Rooted firmly in the community and culture of its home city, the festival prides itself on inviting radical perspectives and challenging traditions within choreographic practice.
With over 30 years of history, Nottdance wanted to update their visual identity in a way that honoured their heritage while looking forwards to the future, with a dynamic brand that could evolve easily with each edition of the festival.
This is the challenge they brought to us – to develop a brand that could serve them for the long term, without ever feeling stale. And it needed doing quick, to be ready for the 2025 edition. No problem.
Early concepts
Our brand design specialist Sam took the lead on this project, and the desire to have a brand that could adapt as time went by was at the forefront of his approach.
Right from the earliest concepts, Sam’s focus was on developing an extensive suite of components and iconography that could be combined, separated, recoloured, reversed, rotated and interwoven with typography to create unlimited different designs that looked markedly different, but nonetheless felt unified.
The Nottdance team were really receptive to this idea, so our early concepts progressed quite quickly from here, focusing on getting the colour scheme and typography just right.
Building blocks for a brand
Once we had these core elements down, we had a shared visual language with our client, and it became very straightforward for us to collaborate on experimenting with how everything would fit together.
A longform and shortform logo that can be updated easily for each new edition of the festival came together quickly, and everything followed from there.
Out in the real world
With a festival to launch sharpish, we needed to keep moving quickly to have everything ready on time, with the rest of the design team stepping in to assist with rolling out all the assets needed.
There was a lot of close back and forth with the fantastic Nottdance team to get flyers, posters and banners together – often before content was completely finalised. The biggest task was a 22 page brochure, turned around in record time to be ready for the printers.
Impact
We’re a bit biased, but we’re delighted with how the brand work and associated assets came out. It’s exciting, colourful and energetic – spend any time with the Nottdance team and you’ll see that it’s just right for them!
Most importantly, this is something that they can carry forwards every year. Individual components can be reworked, or an alternative colour scheme can be introduced, to very simply revitalise the brand for another festival edition, while still feeling 100% Nottdance.
Let’s work together
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