Eurovision Song Contest 2020 visual identity

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— BACKGROUND

Music has power to unite people across different countries. Festivals, concerts and shows bring a variety of audiences together and help them relate to each other both on a local and global level.

The Eurovision Song Contest is the world's biggest and longest-running music show, being watched around the world by approximately 180 million people. It’s an annual international television contest, with participants representing primarily European countries. Following the victory of The Netherlands in the 2019 contest, the 65th song contest takes place in Rotterdam in 2020.

Mandatory wordmark

The contest has its own wordmark that is the standard every year. But every host country creates her own theme and symbol that gives each edition a unique visual appeal.

— THE ASSIGNMENT

CLEVER°FRANKE was asked to develop an identity that highlights and enhances the theme of this year’s contest ‘Open Up’ in a distinctive way.

— RESEARCH

The Eurovision Song Contest started 10 years after the end of the Second World War, as a way of helping to unite Europe through music and creativity. In the decades since it began with only 7 European countries, the competition has gone out of its way to embrace new cultures, new talent and new technologies, and today it welcomes 41 participating countries.

To emphasize this message, we decided to develop a data-driven visual identity that honors the history of the Song Contest in a contemporary way, while leaving room for future growth.

— CONCEPT

The challenge we gave ourselves was to rethink what an identity is, beyond visual elements and a logo. We aimed to bring our expertise in data-driven design to create an integrated versatile identity, one that works visually on several mediums. The additional challenge of limited time for creating such a widely applicable identity led us to make bold choices.

To tackle these challenges, we developed a design system based on the ambition to turn data into a meaningful visual story that is flexible and recognizable.

Taking inspiration from the Dutch Eurovision history and previous logos, we created a modern identity that accentuates the optimistic theme of the 2020 contest: ‘Open Up’.

The Eurovision Song Contest is a celebration of sovereign mentalities. Rather than looking at what divides us, we created something that unites.

By using our custom-made software along with historical data, we designed an iconic identity that is an abstract representation of the flags of the countries participating in 2020.

Adding the colors of the flags chronologically in order of the countries’ first Eurovision participation, the vignette vividly brings out the diverse, yet unified essence of the Eurovision Song Contest.

Artwork launch video

— IDENTITY APPLICATION

In its simple form, the identity is complex, consisting of multiple layers to explore. At first glance, it’s visually attractive and can be applied in many different ways. Behind it, there is a story which complements the theme of Eurovision 2020, ‘Open Up’.

Both in static images and motion, we tied our design to this theme by using the logo in a way that it both brings out the unifying feeling and opens up through time. The result is a celebratory expression of the 65th edition of the contest.

— COUNTRY VIGNETTES

To further enhance the identity and bring the story of this 65th edition even more to life we’ve created unique visualizations for each participating country. The vignettes represent 65 years of data and are filled with the colors of a specific country based on its ranking performance throughout the history of the Eurovision Song Contest.

These vignettes are used to tell specific stories about each participant and enable the brand team to implement the design system in a more dynamic way. This way the story of the identity becomes even more colorful and diverse.

Country visualisations animated

— STYLE GUIDE

In order to support the Eurovision team and all the other organizations that need to apply our design, we created a style guide. As the Song Contest’s communication spans across TV graphics, event & city dressing, merchandise, social media and internet content, the style guide serves to keep all the outcomes consistent and recognizable.

It describes how the design system works by showing examples, and what can and cannot be done with the design system.