Andrea Trabucco-Campos and team have designed a bold, new chapter for the brand identity of the Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes, including a new logo, typographic signature, color system, and motion behaviors that will shift with each year’s festival, as well as a redesigned website and toolkit for social media and video graphics.

The Prizes’ essence is amplified by its logo and design system: making the space for the most important literary voices of our times. The identity introduces new essential elements necessary to demonstrate how the Prizes’ communications have evolved over the last decade.

Punctuation, starting from large quotation marks (apostrophes), becomes the hero, setting the rhythm for the entire identity. The metaphor of making space in between the apostrophes is translated into a motion behavior that amplifies the core idea of the Prizes: the space dynamically changes to contain any number of words, images, and content. This motion language becomes the base for all social and video content, allowing for the writers’ interviews to convey the visual identity and build further brand equity across all channels.

The Windham–Campbell Literature Prizes are awarded annually by Yale University, recognizing exceptional literary achievement in four genres. Each year, eight writers across the categories of fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry are selected to receive this prestigious award. The prize celebrates the winners' contributions to the literary world, while also providing them with significant financial support in the form of $175,000. This substantial monetary award allows the recipients to further their literary pursuits, focus on their creative work, and continue to enrich the literary landscape with their unique voices and perspectives.

A new symbol and logo are introduced to serve as a shorthand aligned with the purpose of the Prizes: quote marks demarcating an open space for writers, an ellipsis to signify infinite possibilities for any elements to appear. The symbol reveals an abstracted letter W, which will serve as the stable foundation as the identity changes year to year.

Typographically, the Prizes now feature a bold voice, which allows for the words to take centerstage with visual impact: Plakat by foundry Lineto is in concert with Catalogue, a warm and very legible serif with a characteristic historic and contemporary flavor.

The identity seamlessly transitions across digital settings where motion makes the identity come to life, while layouts with large scale shifts ensure that print and signage moments carry the same attitude throughout the festival, where the visual language harmoniously coexists with the Yale campus.

The identity is meant to evolve: future editions will feature new typographic marks that will behave in a similar way to the current apostrophes, while unlocking new visual signatures.

A new website has been developed with the last decades’ archives and an entirely reimagined and simplified structure, with three stages planned for each moment in the season: pre-festival, during festival, post-festival. Each writer now has a collection of mixed media which allows their body of work, thinking, and interviews to come through clearly.