Together for Palestine (T4P) is a new cultural initiative using large-scale music events to shift public discourse on Palestine. Its goal is to make space, culturally and emotionally, for artists, musicians, and audiences to engage with Palestine without fear of silence, censorship or penalisation.

The events are intended to be both cultural moments and political ruptures: emotionally resonant events that ripple far beyond the venue walls in the hope that where culture leads, politics can follow.

Pentagram partner Samar Maakaroun was approached to create a brand identity and launch campaign for the initiative, including the design of all materials leading up to the first concert, held at OVO Wembley Arena in London on 17 September 2025. 

The project presented multiple challenges: How do you build a brand and campaign that will help break the silence around the most visible and enduring humanitarian emergency that’s happening right now? How do you make space for urgency without spectacle, for truth without resorting to sensationalism? And how do you create something that doesn’t aestheticise horror or collapse into sentimentality?

“The absurdity of the context, the cognitive dissonance in our lives today, and the conditions that led to the need for the existence of this charity; for a campaign to be written, justified, shaped, and sold, made the design task very difficult” Samar explains. 

In this instance, the standard design rules didn’t apply as it was more important for the work to be sensitive to the wider context, as opposed to being simply a hard sell, brash and loud. “Our design response embraced the tension, the doubt and the dissonance”, she continues. “This was not a time for design showmanship, it was a time for space and reflection, designing from within the discomfort. We’ve named the issue, but we’re not attempting to solve it because we can’t.”

Home to Hope

The visual identity was built around the concept home to hope. Visually, the mark is constructed from the letters T, 4, and P merged to form the shape of a key, symbolising the home, the land and the right to return. The counter of the ‘P’ lifts into a balloon, a quiet reference to Banksy’s Girl with Balloon and the phrase ‘There is always hope’.

The typographic approach combined two typefaces, Nickel Gothic Variable designed by David Jonathan Ross, and a bespoke typeface Samar designed at Pentagram a year ago as a pro bono contribution to the work of Counterpoints Arts. This bespoke typeface carried only upper case letters, made from gauze, and was given the name ‘Ceasefire’. It was shared with the charity in 2024 under the premise that the name will change when there is a ceasefire in place, and the typeface with all character sets will be completed when this happens. The typeface remains unfinished and the name unchanged.

Campaign 

The launch campaign took the same approach: stripped back, direct and emotionally honest. The first asset to go out was a Save-the-Date, and the production was minimal, using one colour, cheap materials and no photography or embellishment. It was a deliberate decision to leave lots of white space. When the Save the Date was announced by a personalised message from Brian Eno, supporters used this white space to add their own words, and it instantly became a platform to hold their collective voices.

A small note, typeset in black and white read: ‘Words feel hollow. Images, unbearable. This is a gathering of artists, musicians, and people for whom silence feels impossible.’

The line-up poster followed. This referenced the language of petitions, and signatures accumulating. What started as a light line up quickly grew to over 40 names, with signatures collected on a first, second, and then third wave announce, designed to look like a petition. 

“This was never going to be a traditional campaign,” Samar adds. “It doesn’t rely on tag lines, visual tricks, or the polish of a high budget production. It was not designed in comfort, but in tandem with a constantly shifting political context. But it was honest. The restraint itself was the point, the absence of design flourishes, the need to polish the story, to disguise the inadequacy of words and images. Instead, it admitted: ‘this is not enough’. But it is not nothing.” 

The impact was immediate. Within 24 hours of the Save-the Date-release, 80% of the tickets were sold, and the Wembley concert was sold out an hour after the line-up was announced. Artists’s signatures and names started to pile up, from an intended line up of 6 to a total of 60 artists. These include Brian Eno, Damon Albarn, Louis Theroux, Amelia Dimoldenberg, Hot Chip, Portishead, Saint Levant, Bastille, Mabel, Sampha, Jamie xx, Benedict Cumberbatch and many others.

In addition to creating Together for Palestine’s visual identity, Samar also designed the campaign for the live event, with a stripped back petition-like aesthetic which was used by Es Devlin for the stage set. The sold-out Wembley show welcomed 12,000 people in person and was streamed by over 200,000 viewers worldwide. The concert was described by The Times as “a game-changing Live Aid moment, elevating the Palestinian cause to the celebrity and pop mainstream”.

Together for Palestine will be holding further events, and merchandise collected from a multitude of visual artists will be available to support the fundraising efforts. 100% of the proceeds will go towards supporting Palestinian humanitarian organisations working on the ground to save lives. Samar also produced limited edition artwork using the word 'Together' in Arabic, this was added to the limited edition T-shirt collection created to support T4P’s ongoing fundraising.

Executive producers: Brian Eno, Khalid Abdalla, Khaled Ziada, and Tracey Seaward.