OUTsider fest
Event Branding & advertisement
OUTsider Fest is an indie arts festival that focuses on Queer and marginalized identity. It revels in the blurring of lines and showcases the voices outside the status quo. It's a transmedia experience, hosting conferences on a myriad of subjects, performance art, galleries and interactive art experiences. Designing for an event that refuses limitations and rejects conformity was a difficult challenge, and one that I felt I had the tools and understanding to accomplish. The task - create a theme for the next festival and design a loose branding system that could be applied to the marketing. It needed to be punchy, provocative, and out of the ordinary. The project demanded to look at design trends and rules and intentionally break some of them to accomplish a design that was true to the spirit of the festival.
Target Audience
My target audience was LGBTIQ audiences and their allies, Austin artists, alternative and marginalized members of society. People unashamed of their identity and their interests, who can revel in the absurd and provocative.
Sketches
I wanted to focus on photographs from the festival and hand done type in my sketches. It was hard to illustrate experimental digital ideas, but I just needed them to be legible enough for me to create the digital content.
First Drafts
In my first round I focused on grunge aesthetics and a DIY style for several different poster designs. I used different themes from past OUTsider fests, as well as a more general theme of the festival through the years.
Finals
I decided to focus on the Cabinet of Queeriosities for my final design. I used blocks of color to create a compartmental feeling like the shelves of a cabinet. Festival photographs cut out and spilling over the shelves create an inclusive design and advertise the outrageous and mature festival that is OUTsider Fest.
Reflection
I scrapped a lot of very experimental designs! I also had to scale back the mature imagery that is part of the festival to make it more palatable for my portfolio. The color block and cutout design stood out to me most because so much of the festival is DADA and I really think my design has that postmodern feel. If I were to revisit this project in the future, I would push the abstract further and make the whole thing filthier. ( In terms of content and grunge design. )