Leeds International Festival of Ideas 25
2025
In October 2025, Leeds International Festival of Ideas welcomed 5,500 attendees for five inspiring days to explore, question, and connect around new ideas shaping our world. Speakers included Chuck D, David Baddiel, Vicky McClure and Caitlin Moran, with themes spanning masculinity, hip hop, motherhood, religion, and power.
Each year, we work closely with the LIFI team to evolve the festival’s identity, shaping new visual directions that build on previous themes while responding to the wider cultural moods of the moment. Last year, the creative centred on the emotions people experience while attending. This year, we shifted our focus to what precedes that moment. We explored the curiosity that draws people in and sets ideas in motion.
We became interested in how shared curiosity brings people together around an idea, how it generates momentum when thoughts align and how it creates friction when they diverge. Exploring these dynamics led us to a visual approach centred on a single, stripped-back character. With minimal features and a consistent silhouette, the character’s individuality can only be expressed through colour, behaviour, and movement.
Giving the small figures legs allowed them to follow their curiosity. They wander, gather, drift, and change direction. Small groups swell into swarms. Lone figures pause, orient themselves and set off on their own path. Together, these behaviours form a playful visual language that captures collective curiosity in motion.
The characters’ uniformity creates a sense of collective identity, while changes in pace and direction add meaning. Movement becomes a language in itself, suggesting how ideas spark, gather momentum, collide, or disperse. In quieter moments, the character appears as a solitary figure—small, reflective, and inviting pause. In louder applications, they gather in swarms, filling screens and environments with a shared, kinetic energy.
The identity adapts to different touch points with ease. Implementation comprised wayfinding, social media templates, stage graphics, printed programmes, and out-of-home marketing assets, such as street posters and billboards. Installations in the festival environment use the characters to create small pockets of activity that shift as visitors move through the space.
The result is an identity that feels playful and inviting, encouraging people to arrive ready to explore, gather, and connect. This latest chapter in the festival’s evolving story builds on its ethos of discovery and openness. Continuing to go from strength to strength, LIFI25 sold out in record time and welcomed its largest audience in the festival’s five-year history.
