De/coding festival type: engaging manifest and latent design research methods to investigate typography used in the brand marks of cultural festivals

Despite the fundamental contribution typography makes to cultural festival brand marks, little is known about the complex role typography performs. Academic discourse has not given this issue due attention with typography excluded from much literature examining the branding, tourism or place-making perspectives of the festivalscape. Drawn from an ongoing investigation into the contribution of typography to cultural festival brand marks, this paper offers to exemplify typography’s role in the billion dollar festival ecology. The author combines manifest and latent design research methods in an analysis of 260 festival brandmarks randomly surveyed from a pool of over 5000 from 18 English speaking countries. Primarily quantitative, the manifest approach sees coder judgement minimalized and visual features of typography objectively observed based on frequently appearing features. The implicit characteristics are conversely hypothesized, with the latent approach focusing on theoretical constructs as observable measures in 2 expert summaries. Debate surrounds the most appropriate research method for studying design artefacts however, this paper asserts that combining manifest and latent design research methods is an effective model to expose the complexities of typography used in the brand marks of cultural festivals allowing for a nuanced understanding of the area.