A tourist-office idea, a hillside garden and an August date, 1946.

The Locarno Film Festival began as a summer idea in a lakeside resort town in the Italian-speaking south of Switzerland. Wikipedia says it was set up by the town’s tourist office, Pro Locarno, together with several people from the film industry, and that the first edition was put together in under three months. swissinfo.ch, in a history published on 2 August 2017, dates the opening to 23 August 1946 and places it “in the sloped gardens” of Locarno’s Grand Hotel. It notes that the timing came shortly after the Second World War, at a moment when Cannes and Venice were both scheduled for September that year. Wikipedia names the film shown on that first evening as O sole mio, directed by Giacomo Gentilomo, and says the programme ran to about fifteen films, mainly American and Italian.

An earlier swissinfo.ch history, by Bernard Léchot on 2 August 2002, says the festival started in the gardens of a local luxury hotel, “beating Cannes by a few months”, and recalls that Lugano, the larger town nearby, had tried open-air film shows from 1941 without keeping them going for long. Léchot writes that an official competition was launched in 1958 after several attempts, and that in 1968 the festival left the Grand Hotel gardens for local theatres. Both swissinfo.ch histories place the arrival of the Leopard prizes in 1968; the Italian word Pardo is still used for the prizes, as in the Pardo d’oro.

The festival has kept its August slot. Wikipedia lists its presidents, among them Marco Solari from 2000 to 2023 and Maja Hoffmann since 2023, and names Giona A. Nazzaro as artistic director since 2021.

The town square becomes a cinema and the leopard becomes a sign.

The piece of Locarno that most people picture is the main square. Both swissinfo.ch histories date the first screenings on the Piazza Grande to 1971; the 2017 article says the square “becomes an open-air cinema” that year, and Léchot links the change to the appointment of the Swiss filmmaker Moritz de Hadeln as director, who later ran the festival in Berlin. Wikipedia adds that the open-air screening has appeared on the Swiss 20-franc banknote since 2017.

The leopard as a graphic sign has its own history. A report by Riccardo Franciolli for RSI, carried by swissinfo.ch on 5 August 2023, says the yellow-and-black spotted mark was created by the Zurich studio GGK and stayed in use until 2005. It says the London agency Jannuzzi Smith was called in during 2006 to give the festival a new visual identity, partly with the sixtieth anniversary in 2007 in view, and that its task was to recover and relaunch the leopard sign. The decisive change, the report says, was motion: it quotes the agency’s line, in Italian, that “we made the leopard move”. The report describes a real leopard, Chota, filmed in Oxfordshire under the photographer Tim Flach, whose walk appeared before screenings for seventeen years, and says the festival meanwhile shortened its multilingual name and later settled on Locarno Film Festival.

Yellow and black recur in the festival’s own descriptions. RSI, reporting on 23 January 2017, called yellow the festival’s dominant colour. When the festival unveiled the Jannuzzi Smith image for its 72nd edition on 30 January 2019, it said the redesigned leopard had not lost its spots but had become a spot itself, “in black and yellow, of course”.

One animal, two colours and a new image every year.

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.

Open poster competitions, a new blue and an artist’s photocopier.

Since the 2021 edition the festival has opened its poster to outside designers. Its press release of 9 February 2021 says a competition launched on 26 October 2020 drew 901 projects from 85 countries, and that the winner for Locarno74 was Luciano Baragiola, a designer based in Lugano with the studio favon.io. The festival says his leopard was broken into 24 parts, one for each frame in a second of film, and that the jury included Michele Jannuzzi as brand consultant.

Two years later the palette widened. The festival’s release of 20 February 2023 names a UK duo, Sarah and Ciaren Diante, as winners for Locarno76, with an image in which the leopard merges with a female figure. It says the design brought in a new colour, blue, “which will enrich the black and yellow palette” of the festival, and cites references from the portraits of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley to op art. The same release lists Jannuzzi as director of Jannuzzi Smith and brand consultant to the festival.

The festival has also handed the poster to well-known artists. The Hollywood Reporter, in a report by Georg Szalai on 26 March 2025, says the Locarno78 poster was made by Wolfgang Tillmans, after Annie Leibovitz made the 2024 image. It says the brief required a leopard and the colour yellow, and that Tillmans combined a photograph of a leopard on a tree, taken in Kenya, with fake-fur mittens he had sewn as a teenager, working on a colour photocopier to give the image a blurred texture. The report connects the result to the festival’s posters of the 1980s and 1990s, which were often close to abstraction.

For a design guide, the Locarno Film Festival shows how one animal and two colours can carry a festival for decades while the image around them changes every summer. Compare the Cannes Film Festival, which Locarno preceded by a few months in 1946, according to swissinfo.ch, and the Berlinale, which Moritz de Hadeln went on to direct after Locarno. For this guide we use leopard yellow, spot black and lake blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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