Cheltenham Festivals graphic identity and illustrations unveiled

Date
18 February 2016

Michelle Thompson has created the illustrations and graphic identity for this year’s Cheltenham Festivals. The Cheltenham Festivals umbrella encompasses Cheltenham Jazz Festival, The Times Cheltenham Science Festival, Cheltenham Music Festival, The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival; and Michelle’s designs aim to differentiate each event while creating a cohesive look and feel across the series.

“When I think of Cheltenham Festivals I think of the outdoors, energy, wonder and extremes. Each Festival has its own character though and so I wanted to create a different atmosphere for each piece of Festival artwork,” says Michelle. “The four images had to work in different formats (for example on the brochure cover and online) and they had to have a unifying narrative across all the designs so I worked on all of the images together to make sure they worked as a set. Each design has its own distinct colour scheme but the combination of traditional and modern, old and new elements help to link the images together.”

The images were created using a number of techniques including paint and ink, scanned physical materials and photography and photographs taken by Michelle. These were then worked up digitally.

The Cheltenham festivals run from April until October this year. For full information visit the festival site here.

Above
Left

Michelle Thompson: Cheltenham festival

Right

Michelle Thompson: Cheltenham festival

Above

Michelle Thompson: Cheltenham festival

Above

Michelle Thompson: Cheltenham festival

Share Article

About the Author

Emily Gosling

Emily joined It’s Nice That as Online Editor in the summer of 2014 after four years at Design Week. She is particularly interested in graphic design, branding and music. After working It's Nice That as both Online Editor and Deputy Editor, Emily left the company in 2016.

It's Nice That Newsletters

Fancy a bit of It's Nice That in your inbox? Sign up to our newsletters and we'll keep you in the loop with everything good going on in the creative world.