The Windham Campbell Literature Prizes, awarded annually by Yale University, recognize exceptional literary achievement in a variety of genres. Each year, eight writers across the categories of fiction, non-fiction, drama, and poetry are selected to receive this prestigious award. The prize not only celebrates the winners' contributions to the literary world, but also provides them with significant financial support in the form of $175,000. This substantial monetary award allows the recipients to further their literary pursuits, focus on their creative work, and continue to enrich the literary landscape with their unique voices and perspectives.
Pentagram created the original identity for the prizes based around the elegant graphic motif of brackets. These familiar literary symbols convey subtext, reveal content and highlight diversity and inclusion, important elements of the awards. The designers worked on the project with Michael Kelleher, the founding director of the Windham-Campbell program.
This year’s identity introduces a behavior of amplification: similarly to how the Prizes highlight important literary voices of our times, the brackets echo its contents, becoming a dynamic device that can be used subtly or very expressively to amplify and frame its contents.
Through the brackets and the single typeface in use, the identity balances consistency and diversity. Yale Now and Display are custom fonts designed by Matthew Carter exclusively for the University.
The identity seamlessly spans digital settings where motion can leverage its dynamic nature, to print and signage moments throughout the festival, where the visual language coexists in harmony with the Yale campus.
