If you’ve tuned into the Eurovision Song Contest year after year, you’ve probably been too many mimosas deep to take note of the programme’s graphic design elements.
Yet the international music competition’s visual identity is as integral to the annual proceedings as pop ballads, diamantes and douze points. Last year’s edition, set in Malmö, Sweden, was inspired by the Northern Lights, while the 2023 contest, staged in Liverpool, England in lieu of Ukraine due to the Russian invasion, was a fusion of both the Ukrainian and British flags.
With just two weeks to go until the competition kicks off in Basel, Switzerland, its artistic directors have unveiled the official 2025 Eurovision theme art. According to images released today, the broadcast’s visual identity is based on a pixelated grid of hearts that will morph, pulse and fade across the stage and onto viewers’ TV screens.
This is Eurovision: Basel Theme Reveal! | #Eurovision2025 🇨🇭 – YouTube
The design was helmed by London-based branding and design agency NOT Wieden+Kennedy, an arm of the global advertising powerhouse Weiden+Kennedy. ‘It was one of those emails that just came out of the blue,’ Adam Rix, the studio’s head, tells Wallpaper*. ‘It was like, this has got to be a wind-up.’
Fortunately for all the Eurovision fans in the office, it was indeed a real request. Working with Artur Deyneuve, the art director of Eurovision 2025, Rix and his team worked to come up with an identity that at once celebrated Switzerland (the first song contest took place in Lugano, Switzerland in 1956) and harnessed all the exuberance of the Eurovision spirit.
‘Everybody has a slightly different relationship with Eurovision, and all of them are positive and just joyful,’ says Rix.
‘The Code,’ a tune by Swiss performer Nemo, took home the 2024 title. The designers wanted to capture the joy of the competition in their theme art.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Swiss singer Lys Assia at the inaugural Eurovision in Lugano, Switzerland in 1956. This year’s celebration marks the song contest’s return to the country.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
The solution? The Swiss grid, a highly-rational graphic design system that revolutionized post-war visual culture. ‘It was Switzerland’s gift to the world, and it informs all modern day communication,’ Rix explains.
All of that rationality, though, needed some Eurovision sparkle. Instead of a classic modern typeface like Helvetica (another one of Switzerland’s gifts to the world), the team used an edgy slanted serif by Swiss type designer, Ian Party. The vibrant colours, meanwhile, reference Basel’s history as a powerhouse for printing; look closely and you’ll notice that the hearts are in cyan, magenta, yellow and black—the hues that make up the CYMK colour model.
The designer compares the solution to a Swiss army knife: ‘It’s this simple thing that can do loads and loads of different things.’ Throughout the broadcast, the hearts coalesce to form Swiss icons like mountains, cows and Nemo, Eurovision’s 2024 champion; accent text during the broadcast; silhouette performers; and pop up on social feeds.
The ocean of tiny hearts also serves to underscore the song contest’s theme, United by Music. ‘At a time where there’s a number of conflicts going on in the world, I think the fact that everyone comes together around music is a really special thing,’ adds the designer.
So will Rix and his team be headed to Basel to watch the grand final on 17 May?
‘We’ll be watching it [on TV] with the rest of you,’ he says. ‘But in a way, that’s probably the best way to see it, because that’s how the world will see it.’
