Sometimes, being in the right place at the right time has its perks. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to design the 50th edition Summerfest logo. Summerfest music festival started way back in 1968 and the iconic smile has been a part of the logo since 1970. Below are a few images showing the smile back in the day. While it has been tweaked over the years, the principle and basic shapes have stayed the same.

The challenge that always arises with any event, is what to include and what not to include in a logo. Over the years the amount of copy within the logo has grown to include in no particular order... Summerfest, The World's Largest Music Festival, Milwaukee, Wisconsin and the festival dates. For this logo, I built the "5" and "0" from scratch and used the iconic smile as the bottom of the 5. I wanted to give it a retro feel, but still keep it modern looking. To achieve this I added some interior lines to the numbers. To signify the dates, I incorporated a guitar neck with the est. 1968. This logo appeared in a few different colors, 1-color red, 1-color black, 1-color white and the way they are shown below... in gold! Gold is a challenging color to work with, you never quite know how it will translate to other mediums.

This logo was created prior to American Family Insurance became the title sponsor, as a result I had to tweak the logo a bit. We dropped the "Milwaukee, Wisconsin" in exchange for the new sponsor logo. At a certain point there were too many words, and we had to trim it down.

Below are a few examples of how the logo was used. We used the logo on everything from a guitar bands could sign, can koozies, a giant photo opportunity, merchandise and more!