MFest - Festival of Muslim Cultures and Ideas

MFest

Festival of Muslim Cultures and Ideas

Dear Designers,

We the MFest team, are excited to launch a new design competition: logo and brand identity pack and invite as many of you to participate as possible. We don’t have a public or digital presence yet, so you will be the first to help develop this new, dynamic, contemporary, cultural, brand. We are really looking forward to getting some great visuals from you!

MFest- Festival of Muslim Cultures and Ideas

MFest, Festival of Muslim Cultures and Ideas, is to become a charity and is the UK’s first ever 3 to 4 day Muslim Literary Festival taking place in London, spring 2018. It’s a fun-packed, annual festival, encompassing, contemporary literature, food, sport, comedy, performance, visual art, music and is built around topical discussions of identity, race and global politics. The ethnic diversity of Muslim communities will be emphasised through events focused on African, Arab, Central Asian, South Asian, Southeast Asian, Turkish, American and Western Islamic traditions and cultures. Our programme will highlight diverse Muslim traditions and expressions and bring together intellectual strands of Muslim history and responses to contemporary issues. This festival is about modern Muslim cultures and ideas, but, will also include elements of past, traditional, Islamic heritage.
In 2018, our exciting programme will include: talks, panel discussions, poetry, performances, art workshops and social events. We are working with some of the world’s leading writers and thinkers. Early invitations have gone to Elif Shafak, Riz Ahmed, Mohsin Hamid, Arundhati Roy, Nadeem Aslam, and William Dalrymple. Potential performances include: Shakespeare reimagined by theatre groups such as Kali/Tara Arts or playwright/poet Sabrina Mahfouz, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, International music and dance. We will also have: Spoken Word performances - possibly including Kate Tempest (award-winning poet and rapper) and Dean Atta (I Ain’t Nobody’s Nigger), comedy with a focus on Muslim women comedians and cooking events with Yasmin Alibhai Brown, Nadiya Hussain and Claudia Rodin. There will also be a programme of children’s and family activities, including storytelling, dance, art and crafts workshops and other hands-on activities, that encourage reading and understanding of Muslim cultures from an early age. In the run up to the festival, there will also be a schools programme for the London area, centred around books, Muslim cultures and reading and writing skills

We also have specific Friends of the Festival members programme for our kind supporters.

MFest target audience

We would like you to design a logo and brand identity pack that attracts our varied target audiences and will help us retain their custom for years to come.

Our audience is a gender balanced, of all ages, with the majority in the 20-40 age range. In year 1, 65% will be diverse Muslim communities and 35% non-Muslim communities, with this growing to 50-50 in subsequent years. The Muslim and non-Muslim composition of the audience will be mostly urban, middle class, and literate. MFest will also reach out to those who read less, and may have been excluded from literary and arts festivals, particularly people from culturally disengaged Muslim communities. MFest will also attract a large number of students (15 to 25) and young families through the schools programme and marketing to universities and by smaller MFest community events running up to the festival in spring 2018. We expect to attract an audience of 2000 to 2500 people during this debut festival while our online presence will reach an additional +20,000.

At MFest, we want people to feel that they have participated in a high quality, feel-good, informed literature festival that offers different Muslim and non-Muslim voices a platform to share Islamic cultures and ideas. Muslim communities, especially culturally disengaged Muslim communities, should feel that MFEST is a celebration of their history and contemporary culture and it should also present itself as a place for informed discourse for all communities and the literary crowd. We also want to promote reading and writing among younger generations, reaching out, initially, to Muslim children in the London area and, in subsequent years, communities throughout the country. We would like young people to develop an interest in reading recognise the value of literature and sharing ideas and aspire to own books and art works. People should come away talking about the festival to their friends, feel inspired, more knowledgeable and looking forward to next year’s offering.

The team could not decide on any three colour palettes (we all had different ideas) so we have chosen five colour ranges for you to work with greens, yellows and golds, browns and oranges, reds and aquas (turquoise), because these are traditional Islamic colours and reds are vibrant colours that stand out. We like bold colours to attract the audience, but are going to leave it to your creative instincts to choose colour schemes!

MFest Logo – some design details

We want our logo to have a modern, contemporary, feel, that should communicate Muslim cultures and ideas. However, we would also like our logo to hint towards past, Islamic arts and heritage. For this reason, we would like Islamic geometry, to feature strongly in the design. The design should also be balanced 50/50 between economical and luxurious, playful and sophisticated, feminine and masculine and also be abstract. It should also be noted that we are a politically neutral organisation.

We would like our logo to have the word MFest and also have the strapline ‘Festival of Muslim Cultures and Ideas, however, we would also like to detach the strapline from the main logo image sometimes or use the strapline alone, we will leave this up to your creative instincts! As far as fonts go, we would like to see both rounded and sharp font options, they, do however have to be clear to read.

We would like you to stay away from organic, fussy logos and from faces and human figures.

The team could not decide on any three colour palettes (we all had different ideas) so we have chosen five colour ranges for you to work with greens, yellows and golds, browns and oranges, reds and aquas (turquoise), because these are traditional Islamic colours and reds are vibrant colours that stand out. We like bold colours to attract the audience, but are going to leave it to your creative instincts to choose colour schemes!

If you need any more information for you can contact our Marketing and Communications Director, Saba who is organising this contest through this website.

Best of Luck!!

MFest Team