Birmingham Design Festival 2025 – Let’s Play

At Cite, we love to keep up with the latest goings on in the creative industry, we’re always on the hunt for inspiration, new ways of developing our thinking and finding ways to challenge ourselves. With this in mind, our creative team headed to Birmingham for the Birmingham Design Festival.

This year’s theme for the festival was ‘Play’, with the focus on embracing curiosity, experimentation, and fun. After all, creativity thrives when we play – something all too easily forgotten in the fast paced industry we work in!

The day was jam-packed with inspiring talks from world class design talent and agencies, exploring and expounding their take on how they implement play and experimentation into their process. TEMPLO shared their insights with us by taking us through how they answered a brief from GF Smith to shift the company from a staid, traditional brand to a modern, dynamic, and playful brand positioning; Liza Enebeis, Creative Director from Studio Dumbar, who demonstrated through a number of their projects how they were able to come to astonishing creative outputs by including play in their process; and also Guardian Editorial Creative Director, Chris Clarke, who really challenged us to include play with purpose, showing how that process can produce amazing creative work even with serious content.

If you would like to see the full list of speakers and goings on, visit Birmingham Design Festival website.

Our top takeaways:

• Find time to play, to create, to understand yourself better as a creative. Push yourself out of your comfort zone every now and again. Learn something new and keep asking questions – that’s what makes you whole as a creator.
• Play with purpose. It doesn’t always have to be super serious. Think about how you can approach a serious subject matter with a playful mindset and possibly communicate more effectively to your audience.
• Lastly, ‘Play’ can become a design system for thinking differently. Make room for play and experimentation in the day-to-day, which can open up new and unexpected ideas and creativity, making our work better.

It was a wonderful day full of great ideas, inspiration and fun together as a team. We’re already looking forward to 2026.