Celebrating the power of plurality.

Brief

For its 20th anniversary, San Francisco Design Week asked us to create the theme and identity for the 2026 edition. It was our fourth year as theme partner. The festival was growing from one week in the city into a full year of design across the region, with editions from Healdsburg and Marin to the South Bay. The theme had to hold all of it together as one celebration, built by many hands in many places.

Audience

The Bay Area design community in all its range: every discipline, identity and perspective, from San Francisco to Oakland, Berkeley, Marin, Sausalito, Silicon Valley, Palo Alto and the North Bay wine country.

Opportunity

Design Week has never been the work of one voice or one idea. It's a collective force, built from countless contributors. The Bay Area design scene is often reduced to tech and Silicon Valley, but it's far broader: human, community-driven and spread across every discipline and town in the region. Twenty years in, as the festival spread beyond a single week, there was an opportunity to honor that shared history and show the full range of who makes design here.

Concept

Multitudes. A celebration of the many disciplines, identities and perspectives that shape design in the Bay Area, and of the groundswell of ideas that forms when many communities gather, collaborate, explore and create. It's a theme where diversity becomes momentum, and where the impact of design grows bigger than any individual place, practice or person.

Design

Many small things coming together. The word Multitudes repeats and multiplies, stacking into columns paired with "A Year of Design," with a wide, shifting palette on kraft and recycled stock. The imagery is all built from halftone dots: many varied images that come together to form a larger "Multitudes" in script. Every layout unfolds a little further, layering and multiplying across the region's local editions, from Design Oakland to Design Sonoma.

Voice

There's power in numbers. The voice is plural by design, always "we," never one voice, and it's warm, human and inviting. "Celebrating the power of plurality" is the anchor line. "A Year of Design" marks the shift from one week to a full year of celebration across the region. Each local edition can carry its own line under the same umbrella, like Design Oakland's "Designing Relevance." The messaging honors twenty years of shared history and keeps the focus on what comes next.