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Creative design

Jókai 200 · 2025

One identity for a theatre stage, a phone feed and a government endcard.

The visual identity for Jókai 200, Hungary’s bicentenary programme for the writer Mór Jókai: a coral and blue system built on a pattern of small drawn symbols, the writer’s portrait and the line A legmagyarabb író. It dressed the gala stage at the Erkel Theatre across ten LED surfaces, in two colourways, and opens every film in the programme as a ten-second ident.

Jókai 200 · Identity and the Erkel Gala Stage
01

The challenge

Mór Jókai was born in 1825, and the programme marking his 200th year ran across a national gala, television, social media and events. One identity had to carry all of it: solemn enough for a state occasion, light enough for a phone feed, and recognisable at the size of a social avatar and at the width of a theatre stage.

02

The approach

The system rests on three things. A pattern of small drawn symbols, quills, stars, leaves and bowls among them, that tiles at any size and reads as texture from a distance. Two colours, a coral and a blue, that can swap roles. And the writer himself: a portrait cut from the archive, with the line A legmagyarabb író, the most Hungarian writer.

For the gala at the Erkel Theatre in Budapest we designed the content for ten LED surfaces: the main wall, two side walls, six columns and a text strip, each in two versions so the stage could change mood between numbers, coral and portrait in one, blue pattern in the other. The same elements became a ten-second animated ident in landscape and portrait, ending on the mark of the Ministry of Culture and Innovation, to open the programme’s films.

03

The work

The stage at the Erkel Theatre, visualised with the coral version
The stage at the Erkel Theatre, visualised with the coral version
Main wall, version A: coral, blue and the portrait
Main wall, version A: coral, blue and the portrait
Main wall, version B: the blue pattern
Main wall, version B: the blue pattern
The ten surfaces laid out, version A
The ten surfaces laid out, version A
The ten surfaces laid out, version B
The ten surfaces laid out, version B
Side wall: the portrait and the line A legmagyarabb író
Side wall: the portrait and the line A legmagyarabb író
Column, coral pattern
Column, coral pattern
Column, blue pattern
Column, blue pattern
The text strip above the stage
The text strip above the stage
04

Films

  • The ident, landscape
  • The ident, portrait
05

The results

The identity ran across the gala stage, the intro films and the Bean Soup Day campaign, each with its own case study here, and gave the programme one look for its year. Audience and broadcast figures for the gala are the programme’s and are not published here.

06

What we delivered

  • Identity system: pattern, two colours, the portrait and the line A legmagyarabb író
  • Logo files in colour, black and white
  • LED content for ten stage surfaces, in two versions
  • Two 3D visualisations of the Erkel stage
  • Ten-second animated ident in 16:9 and 9:16

Two colours that swap roles

Jókai blue

#3880E0

Coral

#F08070

Paper

#F8F8F8

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Jókai 200 · Identity and the Erkel Gala Stage | Magic Pulpo