Kiln unifies BAFTA ceremonies with dynamic particle-led identity

Tasked with developing a unified visual identity framework for the 2026 BAFTA ceremonies, London-based design studio Kiln faced a big challenge. The project required the team to honour the heritage of a historic institution while introducing a contemporary, forward-looking aesthetic across four distinct events: the Film, Games, Television, and Television Craft awards.

A primary challenge was ensuring that the high-profile, star-studded Film awards did not accidentally overshadow the other categories. The brand needed an elastic system capable of altering its form for each ceremony.

“The biggest challenge for us was really figuring out how to honour BAFTA’s historic prestige while leaning into its more avant-garde, creative spirit,” says Edoardo Albertini, designer at Kiln.

To maintain a cohesive master brand while giving each event its own breathing room, Kiln introduced a system of faceted shapes and an expanded colour palette tailored to each category. These varied elements are tethered together by a shared, tactile textural quality within the particle artwork and a rigorous, structured typographic layout.

“The visual presentation needed to guarantee that guests and nominees felt every category was treated with equal weight,” explains Kiln designer Megan Mardon.

“Film naturally lends itself to something cinematic and heightened, so there was a risk of that becoming the ‘main’ identity, with the others feeling like variations on it rather than standing on their own,” Mardon notes.

To prevent this hierarchy drop, the studio created a shared narrative: tracking the journey of a creative project from a raw, unformed idea into a highly refined, award-winning piece of work. While the underlying particle behaviours and typography remain consistent across the board, the shapes and colours adapt.

As a result, the Games identity feels kinetic, frantic, and complex, while the Television Craft awards appear intricate, sharp, and sharply focused.

Ditching Keyframes

Instead of relying on standard industry-default animation tools like After Effects, Kiln chose to build the entire graphic ecosystem within the procedural animation software Cavalry (which was recently in the news for being acquired by Canva). The software allowed the studio to create a live, rule-based environment driven by digital physics rather than manually animating assets frame by frame.

“We went with Cavalry over more traditional motion software because it has this incredible ability to export versatile vectors right out of a procedural system,” Albertini explains.

Building a custom, physics-based framework to control simulated forces and resistances, the studio generated kinetic concepts that could scale cleanly across varying screen resolutions and physical dimensions without losing fidelity.

The ultimate goal was to construct a system that behaved consistently while generating infinite unique variations.

“With Cavalry, we could build our world of particles once—determining how they behaved, formed, and moved—then let that same system generate everything from a 30-second film to a static poster, rather than rebuilding the idea from scratch for every touchpoint,” says Mardon.

This procedural approach provided a compelling interplay between strict creative control and beautiful, unpredictable outcomes.

Freezing Time

Applying a motion-first identity framework to static outputs like printed VIP invitations and official programme covers created an entirely separate set of technical hurdles. The design team had to figure out how to convey fluid, sweeping movement within a fixed, single frame.

“Our solution was to create these denser clusters and flowing rivers of particles,” says Albertini. “It let us capture all those underlying forces and the fluid nature of the motion inside a single freeze-frame.”

Unsurprisingly, freezing a live, physics-based environment onto a piece of paper proved to be the team’s steepest uphill climb. “Print was the hardest touchpoint by far,” Mardon admits. “The entire system was built on movement, so capturing that energy in a single frame without it feeling dead was a massive challenge.”

Rather than manually tweaking static layouts, the team spent hours manipulating the parameters of the motion rig, hunting for the perfect, high-energy collision where dense streams of shifting particles intersected the brand’s linear facets to capture an active, living energy on paper.

Future-Proofing

To ensure the visual identity could be easily maintained long after the initial launch, Kiln designed a highly flexible toolkit for BAFTA’s internal production teams, removing the need for the client to generate new procedural assets from scratch for minor updates.

“We delivered a comprehensive series of artworks for each specific award, completely built out in both scalable vector and fluid motion formats,” says Albertini. This generative framework hands internal teams the exact modular building blocks required to deploy the brand across any future format.

The final delivery combines explicit usage guidelines with pre-curated artwork suites ranging from subtle to highly expressive, sitting alongside a responsive typographic layout.

“Because it was simple and specific, it could flex in either direction depending on the moment,” Mardon concludes. “Sometimes the artwork took centre stage and the type reduced to let it breathe; other times the type stepped up in size, and the artwork stayed quieter.”

This inherent adaptability allows BAFTA’s internal designers to confidently configure new layouts on the fly without ever diluting the baseline identity.