INDIE GRITS 2019 BRANDING
This year we wanted to focus on something that was fun, simple, and colorful, building upon our lessons that we learned in Indie Grits 2018. The design will be inspired by the Rural Project, but will not overpower the festival identity materials. Some festival collateral, like ads, billboards, web graphics, may be more simple in nature, whereas posters, merch, may be more complex in design. Rural Project materials may be more artistic than festival materials, and we may even commission someone to do a poster or artwork, learning from the sales success of the Los Circuitos poster during Indie Grits 2017.
LANDSCAPE INSPIRATION
The festival design this year is roughly based upon our work for the Rural Project. Instead of focusing on photographic imagery, we wanted to go back to more illustrative and simple designs from past festival designs— such as IG 2014 and 2015. The concept is loosely based off of aerial farmfields and the patterns, textures, and shapes that a large perspective creates.
SHAPE INSPIRATION
The next step was doing some research to see how farmfield landscapes and textures can be translated illustratively. Marker, pencil, and pen strokes were determined to be a good technique to mimic the land patterns in a 2-d environment. Textures and illustrations seem to be a theme in past festival branding, highlighting the diy aspects of our festival history (2013, 2014, 2016 & 17). Clean and playful lines, and the ability to layer shapes (color and bw) on top of one another creates the ability for a lot of variety. Design elements that look good monochrome will lend itself helpful when creating preshow slides ( that need to be typically on black backgrounds), and items that may be embroidered or screenprinted (merch).
SHAPE TESTS
Shapes were created by using conté and charcoal sticks, and good ol' mechanical pencils. Shapes were cut out and then manipulated into Photoshop to be created as digital brushes. On the right, I experimented with creating concrete designs focusing on line textures, but realized that doing layouts that were totally hand done would not be as versatile as creating digital elements, which can be assembled on the fly for later designs. These shapes can now be black and white, or used in color situations. I plan on making more, but this is a start :)
TYPE INSPIRATION
I definitely wanted to make sure our typefaces this year look clean, yet have a messy, diy decorative element to it— for merch, large print materials (like posters), or places where we can add details! Having design elements that are integrated into the type also lends maleability for festival materials that may be too small for intricate illustrative detail (small web graphics, billboards). Hand drawn elements are created with a special pencil style I created in Photoshop using my Wacom Tablet.
Cooper BT Light will lend itself nicely to compliment yet offer some contrast between the decorative type elements— serif typefaces are having a renaissance and will offer a refreshing contrast to the past couple of years will bold, grotesque sans serifs (Druk Condensed and Druk Wide in 2017 and 2018). I am continuing to use a monospaced typeface and Acumin Pro Wide (our IGL body copy typeface) so festival branding is harmonious with our IGL brand, in particular on our website. Mailchimp recently rebranded, and is a great example of how a serif typeface with illustrations can offer a refresh to the rut we have been in with sharp clean san-serifs.
COLOR INSPIRATION
The color palette for this year comes from a logical approach as well as an artistic approach. All of the colors are inspired by rural skies and landscapes—dreamy pink sunsets, clear blue skies, lush green pastures, scorching hot summers, rich clay soil. Logistically, having a lot of colors to pick from will lend itself handy to color coding festival materials (festival badges, map design, festival guide design), and also these colors work well with each other and with black and white. The only restriction is using these colors on top of colored backgrounds. It will start looking too all over the place.
WEB BANNERS / SOCIAL MEDIA GRAPHICS
COLLATERAL CREATED
