De/coding Festival Typography.  Building Bridges Conference. Faculty of Heath, Art & Design. Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, 31st Oct 2018 AUS.

Abstract

Despite the fundamental contribution typography makes to cultural festival brandmarks, little is known about the complex role typography performs. Academic discourse has not given this issue due attention with typography excluded from much literature examining the branding, tourism or place-making perspectives of the festival scape. Drawn from an ongoing investigation into the contribution of typography to cultural festival brandmarks, this paper offers to exemplify typography’s role in the billion dollar festival ecology. The author combines manifest and latent design research methods in an analysis of 260 festival brandmarks randomly surveyed from a pool of over 5000 from 18 English speaking countries. Primarily quantitative, the manifest approach sees coder judgement minimalized and visual features of typography objectively observed based on frequently appearing features.  The implicit characteristics are conversely hypothesized, with the latent approach focusing on theoretical constructs as observable measures in 2 expert summaries.  Debate surrounds the most appropriate research method for studying design artefacts however, this paper asserts that combining manifest and latent design research methods is an effective model to expose the complexities of typography used in the brandmarks of cultural festivals allowing for a nuanced understanding of the area.