Catch Stefan Sagmeister, Gab Bois and Dinamo at Forward Festival Berlin — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Stefan Sagmeister, Gab Bois, Mr Bingo, Anton & Irene, FutureDeluxe and Dinamo are among the speakers at the Forward Festival Berlin 2026, with more than 50 thought leaders appearing across three stages over its two days, in keynotes, on-stage conversations and interactive sessions. Held at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) on 27-28 August 2026, the Berlin edition is one of the three annual events that Forward puts on for the creative industry alongside Frankfurt and Vienna – all tied together by the theme: ‘Turn Ideas into Action.’ Running since 2015, Forward has had Paula Scher, Refik Anadol, Malika Favre and Erik Kessels on its stages.
“Range is the point,” the festival’s team explains. “Visitors should leave with several standpoints, not one, which means booking heavyweights like Sagmeister next to people who are still early in their careers.” Graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, creative technologists and motion designers are all on the programme. “A graphic designer can learn just as much from an illustrator’s process as from another designer’s, and those unexpected intersections are often where the most valuable insights emerge,” Forward’s team adds. “The line-up holds together because every speaker answers the same question: how did you get from the idea to the thing itself?” the team notes. “They talk through the messy middle, the detours, the calls that could have gone another way.”
Sagmeister’s talk is about design’s place in life’s bigger questions, while Dinamo arrives as a type foundry preoccupied with how typography carries identity and attitude. Brooklyn-based duo Anton & Irene, represented by Irene Pereyra, bring work for Spotify, IKEA and The Met, and FutureDeluxe, the London studio whose clients include Apple, Nike and Gucci, holds the immersive, technology-led end of the programme. Gemma O’Brien, The Mill, Vera van de Seyp, Sander Plug and Beetroot are on the bill, too.
One of the Berlin talks is presented by us at The Brand Identity. Tim Smith of London-based creative studio FLUORO® is taking the slot with a talk on building brands as living systems and why cultural literacy beats borrowed trends. “The ‘presented by’ slots put creative brands we admire on stage, inside the talk rather than around it,” the festival tells us, offering an audience “the moment an idea stops being an idea and has to hold up in public.” Procreate and Adobe are also presenting guest slots of their own, given to Joe Taylor and Ann-Katrin Ziegan.
A modernist landmark in the centre of the city, HKW has housed the Berlin edition since 2023, two years after a premiere that made Berlin the biggest of Forward’s three cities. “The decision was restraint,” Forward’s team details. “HKW is an experience in itself, and visitors should feel that, so we work with the architecture instead of over it.” Forward puts large-scale banners, carpets, signage and screen installations into the building.
Berlin’s accent colour is orange, and online it “runs through everything,” from the website to social media and the newsletter, while the design inside HKW is black and white. Motion design by Austrian design studio Zwupp, which designs the identity each year across Forward’s editions, plays across the screen installations, and for Berlin 2026 the studio drew a fresh set of posters and pushed the animated, three-dimensional work it began in 2025 into “the next-speaker bumpers between talks, and the video wall installations across the site.”
“Inspiration is easy to hand out and easy to forget,” the team continues, “so we build in places where people have to do something.” Away from the three stages, there are hands-on workshops, exhibitions, networking and a run of side events, including an open stage where attendees put their ideas to the speakers and get advice on the spot, as well as tours inside the city’s creative studios and agencies. “The expo area at HKW is the heart of the festival, where creative brands show their work and visitors make something of their own,” the team concludes.