Cardiff Design Festival returns to celebrate design in the city

Profile picture for user Kayleigh Mcleod

Posted by: Kayleigh Mcleod

Date: 6 June 2019

Cardiff Design Festival will return to venues throughout the city from 10 to 13 October 2019 after a six year hiatus. 

At the pre-launch on Tuesday, 4 June in Tramshed Tech organisers shared their vision to Celebrate Design and Celebrate Cardiff and encouraged others to get involved. 

Illustrate Digital's Melin Edo, of the Cardiff Design Festival team, said: "The events and ideas that you submit will shape the festival. In addition, we will run a few headline events as the festival team.

"Our focus will be to show great work that has been done in Wales as well as bring in some big names from the design industry back to Wales." 

The festival first ran from 2005 to 2013 and was successful in gelling together the design community in the city.

Olwen Moseley, Dean of the Cardiff School of Art and Design, was a founding member and at the pre-launch, she gave thoughts on the legacy of their activity and looked forward to the 2019 celebration. 

She said: "There was an increased sense of identity in terms of the design community. There were lots of requests for dialogue with people including national organisations like the Design Council - it was a gateway.

"It is about a celebration of work. The joy of the festival is that it can be whatever you want it to be - it is about you coming forward with different ideas for events that you might want to hold."

Gareth Strange of the Festival team talked about the brand refresh that branding and graphic design studio John & Jane undertook. 

He said: "I felt it was really important to reflect the legacy of what came before. When the Festival took a break in 2013 there was a bit of an explosion of creative events around the city - Creative Mornings, Design Stuff - there was a real hunger for the creative community to keep wanting to do amazing things, bringing people together. So when we went through the design process, we wanted to give it a mark that was a little bit more ownable for Cardiff so we turned one of the original circles into a C." 

Organisers are keen that this is a festival owned by designers: 

You might have a brave idea that you need to find collaborators to make happen. You might like to volunteer to gain some experience and make new connections. You may want to become a partner or sponsor. Perhaps you want to run an event, invite us to use your space or share your design work. We are in the stages of shaping the festival offering so this is a real opportunity to help develop a series of events that reflect the creative diversity of design in our city.

Cardiff Design Festival team member Dan Spain of Rabble Studio also shared plans to have a festival Hub which would act as a central information point, a workspace, a popup shop, a workshop space and a social space. 

You can get involved here: https://cardiffdesignfestival.com/

Submissions for ideas are open until 4 July 2019. 

Directory

Join the directory

Create a directory profile to share your work and to connect and collaborate with other creatives.

Jess Networking at a Creative Cardiff event