Client:
Fundația9
Sector:
Culture, Institutional
Year:
2024
Type:
Branding
Design
Poster
Strategy
Bucharest Design Festival is not a design festival that happens to take place in Bucharest. It is a festival that could only exist because of Bucharest, born from the city’s specific mix of contradictions, intersections, and creative tension. Architecture next to neglect. Specialty coffee next to mici. A place people love to hate and hate to love, often in the same sentence. Our job was to launch the festival. From the brand strategy all the way to social media posts: brand architecture, positioning, tone of voice, and the campaign that would introduce BDF to the world. Not as another event on the calendar. As a cultural proposition with the city baked into its DNA.
The grand reunion
The Institute, the organization behind Romanian Design Week and Diploma, had been running some of Romania’s most important design and creative education platforms for years. Separately. BDF is the moment they come together. Romanian Design Week now curates BDF’s exhibition program. Diploma powers BDF Young. Cartierul Creativ feeds BDF Communities.
What used to be parallel initiatives with shared DNA but separate identities now live inside one coherent cultural infrastructure, alongside new formats like BDF Professional, BDF Go, BDF Highlights, and BDF Satellites. The challenge was not to invent something from scratch. It was to build the structure that could hold all of this together, give it a shared language, and launch it as one thing. A month-long festival across Bucharest, from Palatul Cotroceni to Piața Amzei, from Ion Mincu to Calea Griviței.
The architecture
Before writing a single line of copy, we built the brand architecture. BDF needed to hold a complex ecosystem: a parent brand and a constellation of sub-brands, each with its own audience, format, and rhythm.
We studied the classic models (branded house, house of brands, endorsed architecture) and landed on a hybrid. BDF as the visible, structurally present parent, with each sub-brand carrying enough autonomy to speak to its own audience without fragmenting the whole. The kind of architecture that looks simple once it works, precisely because the hard decisions were made early.
The Glitch
Three roles, one sentence
The strategic heart of the project came down to defining three roles:
Design is the subject. The content, the discipline, the reason
people show up.
Bucharest is the lens. Not the backdrop. The adverb. The context that shapes how the subject is seen,
curated, and experienced. Bucharest doesn’t host the festival. It inflects it.
The festival is the verb. The
intersection, the gathering, the act of mixing. Where subject meets lens and something new comes out.
That framework (subject, lens, verb) became the spine of everything: the copy, the visual system, the way we talked about BDF internally and externally. It kept us honest. Every decision had to answer: does this let the city in, or does it keep the city out?
Made of Bucharest
The tagline crystallized once the strategy was clear. Not “in Bucharest.” Not “from Bucharest.” Made of Bucharest. The city as raw material. As ingredient. As co-author.
From there, we built the verbal identity. A tone that could hold both the ambition of a major cultural platform and the informal, self-aware energy of a city that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but takes what it makes very seriously.
The campaign centerpiece is a manifesto film built the way the festival thinks: collaboratively, from the city outward. We invited 18 visual artists who have been looking at Bucharest for years to share their material: photos and videos made with love (and sometimes uggghhh) in and of this city.
The launch film
We received hundreds of pieces. Then we curated them, mapped them onto words and music, and sent them out to be printed, cut, collated, stitched, and animated together. Semi-analog. Deliberate imperfection. The kind of texture that cannot be faked or generated, because it carries the fingerprints of too many people.
Original music by Electric Brother. Voice by Cezar Junkyard. No stock footage. No skyline porn. Just the city, seen by the people who stare at it for a living, arranged into something so dense and rich, so up and down, so grit and great, it could only have been born, made, happened in, on, around, over, through and of Bucharest.
Accolades
The film was awarded 3rd place at ADC*RO’s February 2026 edition, praised as “un București distilat prin design.” Six months of work. Tens of people. Hundreds of photos and videos. Thousands of frames. One city.
What we actually built
A strategic platform that gives BDF room to grow without losing coherence. A brand architecture that holds multiple sub-brands inside one legible system. A positioning framework that makes the city a creative asset, not just a pin on a map.
A verbal identity sharp enough to launch with and flexible enough to last. And a launch campaign that does what the best launch campaigns do: it doesn’t just announce. It argues. It makes the case for why this thing needs to exist, in this place, right now. See more about Bucharest Design Festival and explore our other strategic work at Glitch.
Credits
Glitch team:
Miruna Vasilescu, Ana Maria Dudu, Roxana
Panaitescu, Sonia Panait, Domnica Predoiu, Andrei Nicolescu, Simina Leotescu, Dan Stănescu
Visual
artists:
Vladimir Amzar, Alex Galmeanu, Bogdan Anghel, Dani Ghercă, Tudor Borduz, Dragoș Hanciu, Michele Bressan, Toma Hurduc,
Adi Bulboaca, Daniel Kosuth, Cristiana Capota, Denise Lobont, Lavinia Cioaca, Adrian Scutariu, Mihai Ciobanu, Adi Tudose, Vio Dan, Robert
Zamfir
Music: Electric Brother
Voice: Cezar
Junkyard
Edit & MGFX: Diana Radulescu & Dorel Gnatiuc / Kind of Studio
The Institute
team:
Diana Sumanaru, Andrei Bortun, Alexandra Groves, Cristiana Iordache, Raluca Mirel
