Dilys Powell’s table, James Quinn and the new National Film Theatre, 1957.

The BFI London Film Festival began as a complaint over dinner. English Wikipedia says that at a dinner party in 1953 at the home of Dilys Powell, film critic of The Sunday Times, the guests, among them the film administrator James Quinn, discussed the lack of a film festival in London. Pentagram, in its 2026 case study for the festival, repeats the story and identifies Quinn as the then director of the British Film Institute. Wikipedia says Quinn went on to start the festival, and Pentagram says that in 1957 Princess Margaret opened the newly built National Film Theatre and the festival launched on the following day.

Wikipedia dates the opening edition to 16–26 October 1957 at the new National Film Theatre, now BFI Southbank. It describes a programme of fifteen to twenty films that had already done well at other festivals, opening with Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood and including work by Satyajit Ray, Andrzej Wajda, Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini and Elia Kazan, and says that edition was sponsored by The Sunday Times.

The festival then gained its own directors. Wikipedia lists Richard Roud from 1960, Ken Wlaschin from 1970, the Guardian critic Derek Malcolm from 1984, Sheila Whitaker from 1987, Adrian Wootton from 1997, Sandra Hebron from 2003, Clare Stewart from 2012, Tricia Tuttle from 2018 and Kristy Matheson from 2023. It credits Roud’s era with a London Choices strand for debut and lesser-known features from 1965, and says the 1981 edition took twelve programmes outside London, to eight cinemas around the country.

From one riverside theatre to Leicester Square, sponsors’ names and strands.

The festival spread across the city from the 1980s. Wikipedia says Malcolm added venues beyond the National Film Theatre, among them the Dominion Theatre, the Odeon Leicester Square, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the ICA Cinema, introduced a Festival on the Square of more mainstream films and added a surprise film each year, aiming to turn it from a festival for film buffs into one for the public. It says the edition has been “topped and tailed” by opening and closing galas since 1986, that the 1987 festival opened at the Empire, Leicester Square, and that Whitaker began including newly restored films from the National Film Archive and overseas institutions.

The name has carried sponsors. Wikipedia says the event was billed as the Regus London Film Festival from 2000 and as The Times BFI London Film Festival from 2003, and that the 50th edition opened on 18 October 2006. A stand-alone awards ceremony was introduced in 2009.

The present structure dates from Stewart’s tenure. Wikipedia says that in 2012 she organised a formal competition and grouped films into themed strands such as Love, Debate, Dare and Thrill, and that screenings began to spread beyond London. The 2018 edition held a UK premiere at HOME in Manchester, and the 2021 festival opened at the Royal Festival Hall. Filmhounds, reporting the full programme on 4 September 2026, listed the strands for the 70th edition as Love, Debate, Laugh, Dare, Thrill, Cult, Journey, Create, Experimenta, Family and Shorts, and gave the dates as 7–18 October 2026. Little White Lies, on 2 September 2026, noted an Official Competition, Screen Talks and LFF Expanded, a strand of immersive art, extended reality and video games.

An architect’s arrow turned into a festival symbol.

Many film festivals let an object stand in for a logo. The prize handed to winners is often drawn from something tied to the place, such as a plant, an animal, a shell or a local craft material, and once it has been photographed in enough winners’ hands it becomes the shape people recognise. That puts the designer in an unusual position: the mark has to work as a flat outline on a ticket or a lanyard and as a solid thing made of metal, glass or crystal that can be held up on a stage. When the outline is redrawn, the physical trophy usually follows more slowly, because new pieces have to be made, and for a time old and new versions can appear side by side.

The festival also speaks before every screening. A short sting or trailer, often only a few seconds long, plays ahead of each film and is seen many times by the same audience over a week, so it tends to be simple, quick to read and easy to sit through again. Some festivals commission a new one each year from a studio, a school or a guest artist; others keep the same sequence for decades until regulars greet it by reflex. The yearly poster works on a different timescale. It is announced months ahead, printed in many sizes, hung in shop windows and on hoardings around the town, and later collected and archived, which gives each edition its own picture while the name, the prize and the sting carry over from year to year.

DBLG’s cascade, Pentagram’s light and a 1957 sign.

Recent identities have returned to the building. It’s Nice That reported on 2 October 2019 that the agency DBLG had designed the festival’s identity for 2017, 2018 and 2019, starting from the “cascade” sign on the old National Film Theatre. The magazine said the sign was designed by Norman Engleback in 1957 as an elaborate arrow pointing to the theatre entrance, and that the cascade appeared as an icon on festival material in 1961. Creative director Will Mercer told it the team admired the early-1960s posters in the archive. For 2017, DBLG reimagined two of the triangles as lightboxes casting colour across the rest and redrew the logo lock-up in type that graduates in weight towards the word “film”. After that festival the BFI renovated and rewired the sign. In 2018 the triangles stood out in 3D in a spectrum of indigo, purple and fuchsia, and in 2019 they became four translucent triangles with dotted textures, layered like CMYK printing.

For the 70th edition in 2026, the BFI turned to Pentagram. Its case study says the new logo was inspired by Engleback’s illuminated signage, and that the team made the LFF letterforms with specially made cut-outs, passing coloured light through them onto a dark surface and filming the result. It’s Nice That, on 16 September 2026, reported that partner Marina Willer led the work, testing handheld camera moves, hanging letters and a rotating table, and quoted her calling the logo a simple, flat shortcut version of the cascade for an identity meant to live mainly on screens. Pentagram names the typeface as Haptik by Grilli Type, credits Maxwell Sterling with the ident sound, and says light blue joins the festival’s familiar deep purple and warm pink.

For a design guide, BFI London Film Festival shows how a public festival can keep renewing its look while drawing each time on one architect’s 1957 sign. Compare BFI, the institute that organises it, and Berlinale, whose bear DBLG cited as a festival symbol. For this guide we use festival purple, warm pink and projector blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep BFI London Film Festival’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.