This year’s London Design Festival launches with a bold typographic identity by Pentagram partner and longstanding LDF Creative Director Domenic Lippa.  

Only the second major design event to take place in the capital since the global pandemic (after the London Design Biennale, also designed by Pentagram), London Design Festival's ongoing mission is to celebrate and promote London as the design capital of the world. The Festival will once again transform the capital’s landmarks, neighbourhoods and cultural institutions with a series of outdoor installations, exhibitions and special events that will bring people together as London continues to reopen.

From North to South, East to West, the Design Districts are a key component of the Festival makeup. Each District has its own unique personality that reflects the local community and enables visitors to explore events a short walking distance from each other. There will be 10 Design Districts as part of this year’s Festival: Brompton Design District, Clerkenwell Design District, Islington Design District, King’s Cross Design District, Mayfair Design District, Shoreditch Design Triangle, returning after its successful debut last year William Morris Design Line, and newly launched for 2021, Design District at Greenwich Peninsula, Park Royal Design District and Southwark South Design District.

As part of the Festival programme, London Design Festival stages major trade shows, known as Design Destinations. These are the commercial pillars of the Festival and are key meeting places for designers, manufacturers, buyers, specifiers, the media and design enthusiasts to discover new product releases and identify current trends. Making its debut in 2021, Design London will showcase a curated selection of cutting-edge furniture, lighting and contract interiors brands as well as collaborations with renowned and emerging designers.

This year’s identity centres around the idea of ‘form’ and stems from physical letterforms, which were translated by the design team into the graphic language. Black has been introduced to the familiar red and white colour palette—this accentuates the type and gives the identity a bold three-dimensional quality. With so many locations and applications, the LDF identity needs to be flexible enough to work across many different digital and physical platforms, at different scales and when both static and moving.

2021 marks the fifteenth consecutive identity created by Pentagram for the London Design Festival. Domenic Lippa comments: “It’s always collaborative between myself, John Sorrell and Ben Evans. I try to challenge them each year, and they encourage me to surprise them. We collectively know what we want, so the ambition is to constantly reinvent ourselves, but with a recognisable DNA thread linking each year’s campaign with the brand.”

The London Design Festival runs from 18-26 September 2021.