Showcation Lineup Poster

The 2023 Showcation Festival lineup poster.

Overview

Project Type 

Graphic Design

Duration 

March - April 2024

My Role

I was the sole graphic designer. I worked closely with the founder of Showcation and the marketing team to develop this poster.

The Problem

Showcation needed a lineup poster to communicate not only who would be performing, but what sorts of things could be expected at the event. The poster needed to communicate specific tangible things (names, event types, etc) and an overall feel for the event.

The Solution

We designed a poster

Process

We began with a meeting to determine what the goal of the lineup poster was. The founder specified a few requirements that needed to be communicated:

  • doesn’t want the lineup to feel like a standard music festival lineup poster

  • genres of music (bass, live, drum and bass, house, etc.)

  • different types of entertainment (music, comedy, activities, collectives)

  • highlight experiences that make this event unique (pool party, Nickleback and pickle backs, fire dancers, karaoke roulette)

  • that the primary focus of the event is not music

  • it needs to sell the vibe of the festival

I started designing by researching a variety of event lineup posters to see how other events typically communicate. Standard elements include:

  • typographical hierarchy to indicate the importance of performers

  • visuals as borders, icons, backgrounds

  • festival name, location & dates

  • website or social media tag

Then I began by sketching a variety of ways to categorize and organize the information based on this reasearch.

Next, I created some low fidelity mockups of the sketched design directions. This allowed us to quickly explore different layouts and ways of grouping information.

The team thought the last image in the above gallery was the most successful, and moved forward with more iterations. Notable changes in the following iterations are the addition of icons, texture for the background, a new font for the logo, and playing with color to communicate the types of music that would be at the event.

Next,

At this point, we decided to poll potential attendees on our top 3 directions for the poster. The feedback we received was:

  • color coding the music genres was confusing, as the same colors are used elsewhere in the poster (comedy, experiences/activities. savage cabaret)

Rye | Bridge | Showcation | Pitcher | Repose