Manipulate Festival is a UK-based puppet festival pitched squarely at an adult audience - darker, more theatrical and deliberately unsettling in tone. The brief was refreshingly open: an adult puppet festival, and it could be quite dark.
The creative decisions followed naturally from that. Broken puppet strings became the visual hook, immediately communicating control, manipulation and unease. The typeface, however, was the most significant challenge. Nothing commercially available captured the scratched, fractured quality I wanted the identity to have so I drew it from scratch - using an existing font as a structural guide and hand-crafting the distressed forms around it.
The project covered the brand identity, stationery suite and promotional flyer.