Two cinema owners, a Rochester archivist and a Berkeley programmer, 1974.

The Telluride Film Festival began with a visit to a theatre. The critic Howie Movshovitz, writing in The Colorado Sun on 6 September 2019, said the festival started over Labor Day weekend of 1974, after co-founder Bill Pence drove into the Colorado mining town of Telluride to look at the old Sheridan Opera House as a possible cinema. Pence was travelling with James Card, who had built the film archive at Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and Movshovitz reported that Card looked at the building and told him the town ought to have a film festival. Pence went on to stage one with Tom Luddy and Stella Pence.

In a second column, published on 10 January 2023, Movshovitz named the four founders as Bill and Stella Pence, Card, and Luddy, then director of the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. He described the festival as something of an outgrowth of The Flick, the Pences’ arthouse cinema in Denver’s Larimer Square, and said the couple also ran theatres in several Colorado mountain towns. He wrote that Card, who knew many surviving figures of the silent era, arranged for Gloria Swanson to receive one of three tributes at that opening event, with another going to the young director Francis Ford Coppola. English Wikipedia dates the opening edition to 30 August 1974.

The same 2023 column reported that Bill Pence died on 6 December 2022, and recalled him opening the fourth festival from the stage of the Sheridan Opera House in 1977, when it used three theatres. Pence told the audience then that nobody could see everything and that people would have to make choices. Movshovitz has taught in the festival’s Student Symposium for college students since it began in 1990.

Labor Day weekend, a non-profit presenter and no prizes.

The festival still keeps to the holiday weekend. Wikipedia says it is held each year during the Labor Day holiday weekend in early September, and that it is operated by the National Film Preserve; the festival’s own announcements open with the words “presented by the National Film Preserve”. The 2023 release, republished by Telluride Inside… and Out on 30 August 2023, described the festival as a four-day educational event and a non-profit with its headquarters in Berkeley, California, and said its schedule is kept secret until just before Opening Day. Wikipedia puts it more precisely: the line-up is not officially announced until one day before the festival begins. In 2025, AwardsRadar carried the 52nd festival’s programme on 28 August, the eve of the opening.

Movshovitz wrote in 2019 that filmmakers value the absence of a jury: there are no “winners”, and every film is shown as an equal. He quoted Bill Pence recalling an earlier era when distribution contracts were signed on the courthouse steps. What the festival does hand out are tributes. Wikipedia says a Silver Medallion goes to three honourees each year, while a Special Medallion, given since 1995, usually recognises someone other than a filmmaker; in 2023 it went to Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation.

Each year also has a Guest Director, who curates a short programme of older films. For the 50th edition, from 31 August to 4 September 2023, the festival invited six past guests, among them Alfonso Cuarón, Steve McQueen and Mira Nair, to share the role, and dedicated the edition to its four founders. Director Julie Huntsinger said in that release that the programme stood as a testament to co-founders Luddy and Bill Pence, “who are no longer with us”. For 2025 the guest director was Ezra Edelman.

The venues have grown around the opera house. Wikipedia says the 40th festival in 2013 added a new venue, the Werner Herzog Theatre, along with an extra day, and that the festival paused in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic and returned in 2021. The 2023 release named the Galaxy, Werner Herzog and Nugget theatres, and described a fundraising campaign to give the festival a permanent year-round home in the town’s historic Nugget Building. Wikipedia lists the 53rd edition on 4–7 September 2026.

A poster commission with one fixed word.

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.

Invited artists, a four-letter rule and a signing every year.

One visible piece of the festival’s identity changes hands every year. Wikipedia says an artist is selected each year to produce the festival poster, and lists commissions accepted by Chuck Jones, David Salle, Doug and Mike Starn, Dottie Attie, Jim Dine, Ed Ruscha, Francesco Clemente, Dave McKean and Luke Dorman of the Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf. It says the sole requirement is that the word SHOW appears on the poster, a tribute to the large illuminated “Show” sign outside the Sheridan Opera House, where the Silver Medallions are presented.

The same word runs through the festival’s own language. Its 2023 and 2025 announcements call the main programme of new features “the SHOW”, and they list a poster signing among the weekend’s events: by Dorman in 2023 and by the cartoonist Daniel Clowes in 2025. The festival itself is called TFF in those releases, alongside the full name.

For a design guide, Telluride Film Festival shows how a mountain-town festival can keep one fixed word and one theatre sign as its constant while handing the poster to a different artist each year. Compare Sundance Film Festival, another festival rooted in a mountain town, and TIFF, the Toronto festival that follows Telluride in the September calendar. For this guide we use marquee red, canyon pine and footlight gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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