Forward Festival’s identity is a travelling circus that never resets

Forward Festival has been bringing people together since 2015, travelling between Frankfurt, Berlin and Vienna with a programme of talks, workshops and a speaker line-up that features both globally recognised names and rising talents. Graz-based studio Zwupp has designed the identity for over a decade, a run that has since settled into a cumulative system that evolves annually. The 2026 edition makes that approach explicit, as it’s deliberately assembled like a series of components from the festival’s recent years. The ‘swipe’ behaviour that Zwupp pulled from Instagram in 2023 and the 3D, GIF-like visuals of 2025 return, layered into a deliberate mash-up and held in place by the 45° slant of GT Planar – the Grilli Type font that has been present since 2022. In the early years, the Wiener Werkstätte served as the central reference, particularly its treatment of design as a holistic system, which Zwupp set out to translate into the here and now. “We reinterpreted the typical WW artists’ monograms as speaker monograms – developing a WW-inspired typeface specifically for this purpose,” explain Stefan Joch, Lena Wurm and Andreas Putz from Zwupp. “We reimagined illustrations from old postcards, used the textile patterns of Josef Hoffmann and Kolo Moser as stylistic elements, and adapted motifs from stained glass windows, incorporating them into the timetable.” A black-and-white typographic mosaic poster referenced the Werkstätte’s tile graphics in 2024, though as the design has grown more typographic and reduced, the lineage lives in the conceptual thinking rather than the visual references alone.