In Twenty Seventeen I was approached by the founding members of a brand new festival launching in York,PA to help with their branding. The York Fringe Festival describes its mission as "To provide a platform for innovative live arts in the City of York." A fringe festival can have a wide range of live arts, so the client didn't want to focus too much on any one type of art in the branding. With that in mind, I started working on some initial sketches for the logo. I wanted to include an edge to them, to acknowledge either York itself, or even more broadly to feature a nod to Pennsylvania itself, and possibly include a small year to mark the founding.
From these sketches, the client liked bits and pieces from several concepts, so it was time to weave them all into one cohesive piece. We reached a nice balance after introducing some new elements and colors. From that final mark, I also produced some simplified versions, just in case it would need to be more flexible that the full mark wouldn't allow.
After the branding was produced, the launch of the festival was slightly delayed, making the founding year 2017, but the first festival would arrive in 2018. Between that time, YRK Creative was hired to help promote the festival, which meant I got to work on the project beyond the initial branding. Because it was the first year and we didn't have any photography or other media to help market it, I leaned on using graphics to help sell the idea. The client didn't have a large budget to work with, so I scoured old illustrations and material that landed in the public domain, and found a series of old, almost vaudevillian like illustrations that seem to fit the vibe very well. Building upon those with colors fitting the brand and use of textures to add a weathered look, I produced various social media graphics featuring the illustrations and typography of the tagline of the festival.
The campaign was also used on shirts, banners, billboards, and other various material. It was great to not only get to work on the initial logo of the festival, but to get to go back and continue to push the brand. This was the first festival I got to work on, and I took many lessons from this project and applied to them future projects like King Street Jam. If you ever get the opportunity to go to the York Fringe Festival, I highly recommend it!
