DEVELOPING THE LOGO

At the beginning of 2015 I immediately began working on logo concepts. I was given several notes to spark things off: hand drawn, dotted, low-poly/angular. For a time we were even looking into origami as an overarching usual concept. I explored several of these styles, but ultimately they felt too tied to the whims of trend with little insight or consideration into the Whys of the design.

For a time, we actually had a low-poly concept locked down. I liked this design but didn’t truly love it. It felt too cold and imposing. I wanted more energy and buoyancy.

To me, the logo needed to do a lot of heavy lifting all on its own. It needed to introduce us to people in LA, the Bay Area, around the country and convey through simple shape and color what made TBD different from every other festival populating an increasingly crowded summer festival season. It needed to be crisp, clean, appealing to the same people that listened to Cut Copy as Tyler the Creator.
Further, I wanted to portray the uniqueness of our location. How did it feel to be on the riverfront in Sacramento under the golden stacks of the Tower Bridge during one of our signature orange/pink/purple summer sunsets? The water, the sky, the sun. I wanted to find a way to convey all of these things within simple shapes of three letters. And I wanted to do it without featuring literal depictions of these things. This is all expressed in the layered shapes and curves that snap together to form the T, the B, and the D.
For the supporting type, I chose the Geomanist typeface, a smart sanserif whose thin weights could convey sophistication while it’s heavier weights have a character that works well at both small and large sizes without feeling too humorless or heavy. Finally we had our mark…

REBOOT: INTRODUCING THE NEW BRAND

Now that we had our flag, it was time to introduce it to the world. At this point we were still a month out from announcing a single act, but we also wanted to generate some excitement on our Facebook page and possibly stir up interest in discounted pre-lineup Early Bird tickets. So I came up with a way to stoke some chatter.

On a Friday, I switched our Facebook page’s avatar and cover photos to a black square and 3 colored dots respectively. No captions, no post, no explanation for any of it. It was such a stark change, that people would notice it and want to know what was happening. I made sure to instruct all of our people to let the public chatter grow and not respond to any of it. Let the mystery build on its own. I wanted it to feel like a system rebooting on its own.

Starting on Monday morning the following week, it all started filling in. Once a day, we’d update the avatar and the cover. Piece by piece the new logo would reveal itself. When the logo was done filling in, the cover illustration likewise began presenting itself. We still couldn’t announce any acts, but we had event artwork to build initial buzz from. Within a matrix of dots teasing out the TBD, were the Sacramento skyline, the riverfront, the iconic Tower Bridge, and striding above it all, our brand new mascot.

TIBBY, THE TBD ROBOT

If I had approached all of this from a single starting point I highly doubt the idea of a mascot ever would have entered my mind. It’s just not the sort of thing I would have thought of. But something about that robot from the New Year’s poster simply worked. People loved it, it was different than anything other comparable festivals were doing, and it had personality. And best of all, with our niche being divided pretty squarely between electronic music and hip hop, here was a character that felt equally tied to both. He became an ambassador, a quasi-spokesman, and (in a way) a second logo.
Over the course of the run-up to the festival, he was a great way to introduce announcement dates, ticket offers, and even celebrate historic milestones.

PHASE ONE LINEUP ANNOUNCEMENT

In mid-May we announced the first phase of our lineup. This was a challenge in more ways than one. Being a smaller regional festival, we didn’t have the kind of established name that would demand the world’s attention. We needed a way to make the announcement itself an event that would be exciting on its own merits. Our smaller stature gave us the freedom to have some fun with the format.
We wanted to do some kind of public event, but with a lineup reveal that was more than just a list of names either posted or spoken. I wanted this to be fun. And I wanted it to be something that you had to be at to hear first. Something that rewarded you for attending the announcement party.

My idea was twofold: first, we get DJ Greg J to spin a special set comprised only of songs by artists on the lineup. If you were there in the crowd, you’d hear a Chromeo track and that’s how you would know Chromeo was playing. But it needed something visual to accompany it. That’s where the idea of an animated poster came in. Sacramento designer and video artist Judd Hertzler dropped my poster art into After Effects and brought it all to life, but even more importantly, he devised a way for us to use a laptop to live-trigger each new name revealed in real time. As you heard a Chromeo track drop, you would also see it pop up on the motion poster as it was projected onto the wall of the club.

It went off beautifully. As the names stacked up, the crowd thickened and waited with piqued enthusiasm for each new name. It became almost like watching a football game, with cheers, applause and crowd roar greeting each new name.

THE FINAL POSTER

In mid-June we were finally ready to reveal the poster. Gone was the matrix of teaser dots, giving way to a panoramic illustration of one of the festival’s strongest attributes: its location. I once again wanted to capture the feel of our widescreen skies at sunset. That crisp summer air and warm energy of twilight setting in.
Since we needed to satisfy the dual needs of attracting people from SoCal and also the Bay, it was decided that we should do two colorways: a Blue Sky version for people coming in from San Francisco who might be worried that the inland summer heat in Sacramento would be too hellish, and my initial preferred version referencing our spectacular sunsets in rich sherbet tones of purple and orange.

THE WEBSITE

(Note: you can see an archived version of the site here.)

I worked with my developers to create a pure CSS transition from the two posters different backgrounds, seamlessly shifting from the orange gradient to the blue. It worked beautifully and since it was all-CSS it loaded swiftly and cleanly, even on mobile. For SEO purposes, I wanted the home page lineup to be set in dynamic text. It would have perhaps been a lot easier to make this a static graphic but I was determined to set this all in HTML with media-queries resetting the text on mobile. It wasn’t easy, but I think it made all the difference.
For the interior Lineup page I brought back the dot motif as a way to standardize what I was anticipating to be a number of band press shots of varying qualities and form factors. I wanted a way to show off the variety of acts in a “roundup” style that also gave users a simple way to immediately sample each artist. Every act was linked to representative videos and (when possible) Soundcloud pages.

In addition to the website, we also had a very robust social media presence, incorporating our branding and mascot into the steady pulse of our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter streams. We employed a playful attitude toward online sales, individual artist announcements, held a number of different interactive contests, and even used our social media to mark the historic passage of marriage equality that June.

THE EVENT / BRANDING THE LOCATION

Onsite branding included numerous scrims, “totems” (large 4 sided pillars which featured schedules, stage names and artwork featured in the 2015 TBD Poster Series), stage video interstitial bumpers and screen printed tee shirts and tank tops.

CONCLUSION

While this was indeed a gargantuan project, I was able to create an extremely cohesive look and feel that cascaded through countless promotional materials including many pieces of social media, print, web, video and other assorted ephemera not showcased here. The brand gave a sense of place, identity, and personality to the event that managed to really capture the public’s imagination in a way that even caused members of the public to pick up the torch and run with it. Over the course of 2015, the logo and our mascot appeared all over the region and the country. One of the greatest complements I saw to how the work was resonating was on the final night of the festival when I ran into a working Tibby costume that someone had built to wear to the event.