International Assembly’s 2025 identity stages a typographic parade

For International Assembly’s 11th year, Warriors Studio could have designed the identity alone. Instead, they reached out to Nam Huynh and Mark Bohle of NAM – friends who’ve exhibited at the festival, run workshops together, and collaborated on everything from AR apps to poster exhibitions across multiple continents. The relationship traces back to 2014, when NAM first appeared in the festival’s inaugural poster exhibition, evolving through years of shared projects and adventures into something that feels less like a client relationship and more like family. The creative direction emerged from those years of shared experience. NAM had visited Glasgow’s design festival multiple times, absorbed its atmosphere, and understood something Warriors themselves recognised – the energy of the event lives in its people, its unexpected encounters, its sense of occasion. They captured it in a single phrase: “under lights and open skies, friendships form and fun is real.” That observation became the foundation for the visual system. Huynh explains their starting point: “International Assembly is like this big celebratory parade of exciting people and stuff. It’s personal, friendly, full of interesting characters and happy people. So that’s where we started from.” The parade metaphor works on multiple levels – speakers as performers, festival information as confetti, the entire event as a procession of creativity. Bohle elaborates: “We imagined giant balloons drifting by and candy being thrown into the crowd!”