Voices in the Forest - exciting minds, is a four day event celebrating the innovation and creativity that's part of the Forest 's heritage and it's future. It's about creative thinking in all aspects of Forest culture - from entrepreneurs to engineers, artists to activists.

Forest of Dean District Council wanted a promotional item that was: quirky, creative, attention-grabbing, and an example in itself of ‘thinking differently’

We started the design process by looking at the budget and the quantity that would be needed, as it was important that the ideas we proposed could be produced in the quantity required. It became clear that whatever was produced was done so out of one sheet of paper (so no stapling of pages or assembly of different parts to use up the budget). We were keen to avoid standard shapes and sizes as the format of this item would be one of the first things anyone would see (and hopefully be attracted to). We came up with the idea of a square leaflet (so it was easy to trim to shape) – but that folded into a triangle. This proved very popular and could also be produced in sufficient quantities for distribution.

The existing branding from previous festivals was very dark and out of date so we could effect all aspects of the new brand. We did see if there was a way of avoiding the obvious symbolism of using a tree in the logo, but it became clear that the location of the festival was a key part of its identity and something to be celebrated. So the task became how do we use tree imagery but in a new way. As the festival is 'of the forest' and 'in the forest' we generated an idea to give each of different events and themes their own symbol (the Food/Market place used an apple, the Bandstand had a trumpet and the Youth Theatre a mask), which in turn were displayed as being the fruits on the tree that formed the festival logo.

The final leaflet was a pocket size triangle that was distributed widely throughout the region by Tourist Information Centres, Local Newspapers and Letterbox drops.

The design was later extended onto a website banner graphic to update the web pages and keep the branding consistent.