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Festival Fusion

May 19, 2011 Branding

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MGD has the great pleasure of designing the marketing materials for the 2011 Philadelphia Live Arts and Philly Fringe Festivals. This includes the development of a festival graphic that helps define the relationship between the two festivals.

Live Arts and Philly Fringe are, in fact, two different festivals. Live Arts takes the main stage and features—by invitation only—a dozen or more of the world’s most cutting-edge, high-quality contemporary performing arts groups. Running simultaneously on the metaphorical “edge” of Live Arts, is Philly Fringe. This unfiltered festival presents the work of new and established artists.

The two festivals are linked by time (they both run from September 2–17, 2011), by a multi-dimensional definition of performance art (theater, music, comedy, improv, dance, interdisciplinary), and by a stellar staff that organizes and promotes them both.

Our approach fuses the titles into a single graphic structure that captures the dynamic, bold, and multi-dimensional personality of the festivals. They co-exist to illustrate their temporal connection, but by occupying different spatial planes each festival establishes its independence. Live Arts is larger and more forward facing, to convey its “main stage” positioning, while Philly Fringe is, well, on the fringe.

For festival-specific materials, the unit gets disassembled to feature just one of the titles. The absent title is referenced through the use of lightly screened shapes.
We are creating bus shelter posters, postcards, invitations, an At-A-Glance guide, and a 120+-page festival guide that details the entire fusion of events. You can also check out the website, which will soon adopt our visual approach.

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