January 29, 2024

International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), North America’s premier contemporary design fair to be held May 19-21, 2024 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, has unveiled a new campaign designed to highlight ICFF’s marketing evolution under the direction of Odile Hainaut and Claire Pijoulat. The strategy includes solidifying ICFF’s role as a business accelerator; transforming the brand into a 365-day-a-year platform; and clarifying its objective of being at the center of design culture, community, and commerce.

“We want to shift away from a more corporate identity to mark a new chapter for ICFF. By reimagining the brand’s core, we are unveiling a fresh look, positioning the show as the leading North American contemporary design fair at the forefront of the industry. Our goal is to inspire, engage, and support design companies and enable success. This direction affirms our commitment to design excellence beyond the show and infuses an energy and creativity that speaks to emerging audiences,” says ICFF Brand Directors Odile Hainaut and Claire Pijoulat.

To translate this strategy into visual form, the ICFF team looked to award-winning creative agency forceMAJEURE to develop a new ICFF brand identity. With its dramatic art direction and eye-catching creativity, the campaign incorporates a unique approach for the brand, which celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2024.

The rebrand reflects the spirit and vitality of New York City. A grid system underpins the visual language – like building blocks – allowing new elements such as color and images to be added, moved, and transformed as desired. The distinctive logo, which remains in the previous palette of black and white, is now comprised of a solid, heavy wordmark juxtaposed with a lighter, supportive typeface.

“ICFF needed a visual identity that felt more distinctive and one that could provide the flexibility to amplify the various individual expressions that we support. From brand strategy to logotype, colors, typeface, and navigation, the goal was to make this repositioning function across all mediums, from social media to the website to the show itself,” states the forceMAJEURE team.

In changing the perception of the visual identity, the team at forceMAJEURE redesigned a stark and restrictive logo of a black square and four letters and added color to represent each distinct ICFF feature with strong identities: yellow for Wanted (forceMAJEURE designed its visual identity), green for Oasis (which focuses on sustainability), and blue for the new Bespoke area (which centers around high-end craftsmanship), with plans to add more in the future. Color brings a sense of excitement and warmth to a brand that is repositioning itself, injecting it with a newfound energy.

The forceMAJEURE team continues, “Our vision for ICFF is highly connected to New York City, its home. The city truly embodies everything the brand communicates. It is bold and universally recognized. It is international. It is a portal to the U.S. market, where dreams are accelerated, and inspiration is plentiful. Taking a birds-eye view of the city and its iconic grid, we see large blocks from the avenues of buildings and observe an infinite sense of modularity. The elevated new logo embodies the functional and emotional allure of ICFF, evoking confidence and innovation but also creative possibilities.”

Photo credit: ICFF