Rudolf Bing, Harry Harvey Wood and a city chosen for its castle.

The Edinburgh International Festival began as a conversation in London. Wikipedia quotes Harry Harvey Wood, then head of the British Council in Scotland, recalling that the idea was first discussed over a lunch table in a restaurant in Hanover Square towards the end of 1944. At that lunch Rudolf Bing, the Austrian-born general manager of Glyndebourne Opera, argued that festivals of music and opera on the pre-war scale were unlikely to return to the damaged cities of continental Europe for many years, and that one might be staged somewhere in the United Kingdom instead.

Wikipedia says the idea had first taken shape among Bing, the arts patron Lady Rosebery, the theatre director Tyrone Guthrie and the singer Audrey Mildmay during a wartime tour of a small Glyndebourne production of The Beggar’s Opera. It names the co-founders as Bing, Harvey Wood, Sidney Newman, Reid Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh, and a group of civic leaders including Sir John Falconer. Bing had looked at several English cities before settling on Edinburgh, which he had visited in 1939, and Wikipedia says the castle reminded him of Salzburg. Harvey Wood took the proposal to Falconer, who welcomed it on behalf of the city; as it was too late to prepare for 1946, plans were made for the following year. Wikipedia gives the festival’s remit in its own words: to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”.

The first International Festival of Music and Drama ran from 22 August to 11 September 1947, with Bing as its first director. Wikipedia describes a broad programme of orchestral, choral and chamber music, Lieder and song, opera, ballet, drama and film, together with Scottish piping and dancing on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle. The Vienna Philharmonic played that season with its former conductor Bruno Walter. Glyndebourne brought two opera productions a year from 1947 to 1951, and the Sadler’s Wells Ballet danced The Sleeping Beauty with Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann at the Empire Theatre.

Theatres used since 1947, a church on Castlehill and eleven directors.

The festival has no single site; it borrows the city’s halls. Wikipedia lists the Usher Hall, built in 1914, the King’s Theatre, opened in 1906, and the Royal Lyceum Theatre, opened in 1883, as venues used since 1947, and the Festival Theatre, the former Empire, remodelled in 1994 for opera and ballet. The festival’s own base is The Hub, built in 1842–44 as the Tolbooth Church to house the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Wikipedia says the building stands on Castlehill directly below the castle, with a tall Gothic spire, and that since 1999 it has served as the festival’s central box office, information centre and offices as well as a venue in its own right.

The festival is shaped by its directors. Wikipedia lists them in order: Bing from 1947 to 1949, Ian Hunter from 1950, Robert Ponsonby from 1956, the Earl of Harewood from 1961, Peter Diamand from 1966, John Drummond from 1979, Frank Dunlop from 1984, Brian McMaster from 1992, Jonathan Mills from October 2006, Fergus Linehan from October 2014 and Nicola Benedetti from October 2022. The Guardian reported on 8 May 2014 that Linehan, appointed in April 2013 as the festival’s tenth director, would formally succeed Mills on 1 October that year. It said his first festival, in 2015, would choose events on their individual quality rather than follow the distinct themes Mills had used, and that he would move the festival entirely into August, to run from 7 to 31 August 2015 in step with the Fringe, a link broken in 1996.

STV News reported on 1 March 2022 that the violinist Nicola Benedetti had been announced as the next director, taking over from Linehan in October after his eight years in the post. It quoted her saying that the festival “was founded on principles of reconciliation and the ideals of art transcending political and cultural fracture”.

A festival that borrows a whole city.

Some festivals own a single field or park; others are spread across a whole city and borrow its concert halls, theatres, churches and squares for a few weeks. The second kind cannot rely on stage architecture to carry its identity, because the buildings belong to someone else and keep their own names, signs and colours. Its identity has to travel instead: on banners hung from lamp posts, on window cards in shops and cafés, on a printed programme that visitors carry from venue to venue, and on a central box office or information point that becomes the one permanent address. The printed programme often does more of the work than any logo. It sets the order of events, the way dates and venues are written and the tone of the descriptions, and for many visitors it is the object they keep afterwards.

A single-site festival faces the opposite task. It controls every structure, so it can build its scenery from scratch each year, and many such events choose an annual theme or story that governs the main stage, the campaign artwork and the merchandise for one edition before being replaced. When a festival of this kind licenses its name to editions in other countries or seasons, the theme can be reused, adapted or rewritten for the new site, while the name and mark stay fixed. Sponsors add another layer, sometimes lending their names to stages, tents or the event itself. For designers the practical question is the same in both cases: which elements must stay constant so that the name is recognised in any setting, and which can be allowed to change with the venue, the year or the partner.

Artists’ programme covers, a Dutch concept and an Edinburgh studio.

For much of its history the festival’s look came from artists rather than a fixed graphic system. The Edinburgh auction house Lyon & Turnbull, in a story by its specialist Harry Fletcher published on 13 July 2026, wrote that the festival has long commissioned artists to create original programme covers and promotional artwork instead of relying only on commercial graphic designers. It singled out a programme cover by the Scottish painter Robin Philipson for the 1958 festival and a design by the French poet, playwright and artist Jean Cocteau for 1961, and named John Bellany, Eduardo Paolozzi, John Byrne and Alasdair Gray among the other contributors. Fletcher noted that programmes were kept as souvenirs and posters framed, so that the artwork often outlived the events it announced.

The present identity is more recent. In a news post dated 14 September 2018, the festival said it had launched its current brand identity in 2016, with an original concept by the Dutch creative agency Fabrique and subsequent designs by the Edinburgh studio Touch. The same post opened a two-stage pitch for a creative design agency to lead brand design for the 2019 festival, with the possibility of renewal each year until 2022, and said the aim was to evolve the existing design and reshape the brand narrative in the years leading up to the festival’s 75th anniversary. It added that, with work ranging from international opera to local school workshops, the brand had to be versatile and engaging for everyone.

The festival also sits inside a crowded August. Wikipedia says the Edinburgh Festival Fringe started as an offshoot in the International Festival’s first year, that the Edinburgh International Film Festival also began in August 1947 with a programme of documentary films, and that the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, first staged in 1950, is organised separately. Together, it says, the group of events held in the city in August is referred to as the Edinburgh Festival or Edinburgh Festivals.

For a design guide, Edinburgh International Festival shows how an event spread across a city’s concert halls and theatres can hold its name through a run of artist-made covers, a permanent base in a former church and an identity revised for each new period of directors. Compare Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the open festival that grew up beside it in 1947, and Montreux Jazz Festival, a music festival tied to a single lakeside town. For this guide we use Castlehill slate, programme gold and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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