Typography is an important visible element of a cultural festival’s brand mark, yet is
overlooked within cultural festival research. An abundance of work has been published that
examines cultural festivals from cultural, economic, tourism, and place-making perspectives,
yet there is a shortfall in scholarly research addressing the key role typography performs to
engage audience participation through cultural festivals’ primary brand driver – the brand
mark. This paper critically considers triangulation as a constructive and effective research
framework for enquiry into typography deployed in the brand marks of cultural festivals and
provides a roadmap to further research. Offering an analysis of how and in what way
typography is being used in the brand marks for cultural festivals, this paper contributes a
discussion of appropriate research methods in the examination of this material. Triangulation
is engaged as a research technique combining the methods 1) content analysis, 2) case study
(text analysis) and 3) a semiotic analysis of typography as a framework to advantage three
perspectives on typography, capturing the complexities of the phenomenon. Through a pilot
study of 20 cultural festival brand marks from English speaking countries in 2016, the findings
show that triangulation of three methods is beneficial to uncovering a rich and nuanced
understanding of the role of typography in brand marks. Although many research methods are
available to design researchers, the authors argue that triangulation, is an appropriate method
to analyze typography used in the brand marks of cultural festivals as it allows for the
emergence of a heterogeneous understanding of the discipline.