Bram Stoker Festival

The Bram Stoker festival was established by Dublin City Council and Failté Ireland so that there would be a major Dublin cultural event at Halloween, one that they hoped would convince people to visit the city. This year a new team was tasked with moving the festival into a next chapter of its development. We talked a lot with them to establish the core nature of the festival, what their approach to it would be and what the expectations were. The main brief was to make an exciting and contemporary festival that would attract young international visitors, but without losing the appeal to Dubliners, particularly families.

The previous logo was a dracula character, and it was used on all the banners, flyers, posters etc. We felt it framed the festival too narrowly, putting focus on a character that wasn't really part of most of the events. People didn't really know what the festival was about or who it was for. We established that the festival had to have a spooky feel but that it was about arts ability to capture contemporary events and transform them with imagination. 

This idea of transformation is something that is at the heart of the Dracula story, and as can often happen, the most challenging part of the brief [make it talk to families AND a young, urban, international audience] offered an opportunity. The idea of the day being innocent and the night being much more exciting and hedonistic resonated with the new teams plans. They even went as far as to finalise the curation based on a day schedule and a night schedule so that the whole thing fit together neatly. We developed a new logo, a day/night transformation image and a tagline for each to help give a better idea of what the festival was about and the shift in focus between day and night.