Jungle Se7ens - Branding a festival

As a designer I have worked on music events but never a full festival identity, this was a big design project for me which I was excited to learn about and taking it on solo will mean that it will be challenging but equally rewarding. I started by researching some existing festivals and found some information about the different approaches to the ways in which  they were individually designed.  

General trends and advice:
COLOUR 
Most colour palettes will be 2-5 colours for the entire identity, often focusing on a colour palette of similar colours and then one accent colour.

TYPOGRAPHY 
The most essential job for the music festival as it will be on all of the graphic outcomes and instantly be associated to the festival. The typeface needs to be legible at small points so that it can be read on mobile devices and social media outputs.

IMAGERY
The logos, type and graphic elements are often kept black or white so that they do not interfere with the colourful imagery beneath. The imagery is most commonly bright, vibrant, based on the light shows, crowds, the area it is set and just atmospheric in general. 

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/tsto-flow-festival-helsinki-graphic-design-180618
2018 Flow Festival - Tsto 

2011, Helsinki-based studio Tsto designed an identity for Flow Festival featuring a bold typographic treatment that has become synonymous with the festival’s name.

Typographically led, Flow Festival’s identity plays with two widths of serif fonts, full of tiny details expanding in corners at points and reducing in others. It was an identity that worked, instantly recognisable with the festival’s reputation and mirrored the collective of artists playing its stages. Yet, “on our new beginning, we felt like we’d want to extend the typeface and take the typographic system a bit further,” Tsto studio tells us from Helsinki. “For the Flow typeface, we added more alternative characters in the original hand-drawn style. In addition to drawing more characters ourselves, we commissioned type design duo Schick Toikka to draw derivative typefaces based on the original,” it continues. The result is two “more flashy display faces and one being a text face.”










https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/what-does-it-really-mean-to-brand-a-festival/

What does it really mean to brand a festival?

While this proliferation might seem to indicate that organisers can throw any old line-up into a vast arena and a girl with a glittery face will shove $400 in their hands, the reality is the opposite: each festival is having to compete more fiercely to sell tickets, and as well as considerations like lineup, price point, and extracurricular happenings, that means ensuring branding is totally on point—which is where the designers come in.

Fyre Festival 
The premise of the event, organised by rapper Ja Rule and 25-year-old tech entrepreneur Billy McFarland, was a luxury boutique affair on an island in The Bahamas, relentlessly promoted on social media by  supermodels and “influencers” like Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner, who was reportedly paid $250,000 to promote the event on her Instagram account.
Logo-wise, it was very much of the moment: a sans serif, wide-spaced word mark and a little flame icon not unlike Tinder’s. 

Day for night Festival
The studio wanted to create a look and feel that spoke “more maturely, and speaks to a more technologically savvy crowd that might not get too wasted. Keegan explains that the team used a program called TouchDesigner for the live visuals, “and now we can live type in real screens in real time. We can get [people] pumped up and literally talk to our audience.”

“What other festivals call art is not an enriching experience, but our main goal is to activate a space you could walk around in between acts and be mesmerised and learn something. Of all of the visual art we bring in, 90% is site specific and the first time it’s been done.”

Green Man Festival 
“With Green Man it was the opportunity to do the design for everything: the parking permits and all the silly little bits of officialdom that will carry the brand—signage, wayfinding the screens on site,” says Lovers founder Alex Ostrowski. “It’s a designer’s instinct to get the thrill of that continuity. Any brand has that challenge and a festival is a great example of it, but there’s so many touchpoints. It’s a real challenge in consistency.” According to Ostrowski, the key to making a festival identity work across all touchpoints lies in “not making it all rely on one thing.”

The agency deliberately veered away from the obvious route of giving the Green Man a face or persona, and instead created a bespoke typeface based on an old type specimen “to assert his omnipresent booming voice…We then added a few Celtic quirks, turned it into a woodblock typeface, printed it and digitised the scuffed physical prints into a working font.”