A new client, a new lakeshore

The Same Same But Different Festival brought me on for the first time in 2022 to handle poster design, social assets, and motion work for their annual event at Lake Perris in Southern California. It was a first engagement with a new client, and the kind of project where the location does a lot of the talking … if you let it.

Setting the scene

Lake Perris sits in Riverside County with a quality that’s hard to pin down: part beach party, part desert retreat, part something more cosmic. The 2022 lineup leaned into that mix, with headliners like GRiZ, Chromeo, Tipper, Vulfpeck, and The Glitch Mob spanning funk, electronic, and everything in between. The visual world needed to hold all of that.

I built the illustration around the lake at its most heightened — a psychedelic sunset with deep teal water, towering palms, and a full moon climbing above the horizon. Warm and inviting on the surface, but with enough strangeness underneath to signal that this weekend was going to go somewhere unexpected.

Carrying the look through

From the poster, the visual language extended into social assets and motion work, keeping the illustrated world of Lake Perris consistent across every touchpoint leading up to the event.

The promoters liked what came out of 2022 enough to invite me back for 2023 — this time in an expanded role that included building out a more structured brand system for the festival. You can see that work here.