Pitchfork Music Festival
Music’s underground meets
The Underground.
Project Scope
Visual Identity
Art Direction
Ad Campaign
About
Every year across London’s sprawling music scene, Pitchfork organizes a city-wide festival to showcase a variety of artists. To match the publication's primarily online existence, I developed a visual identity that aims to boost visibility for the festival and the quality journalism that Pitchfork is known for.
Trend Analysis
To start, I identified the trend of popup campaigns, particularly from two different perspectives: from a marketing perspective, and from a music artist’s perspective. From an artist’s view, popup events give fans a new way of interacting with music and give them more tangible ways of connecting. From the marketing perspective, I used the New York Times as an example. In 2023, they took over a train station in New York and transformed it into a branded experience that advertised their brand houses (see here).
These perspectives gave me good insights on how to create an effective campaign that increases engagement with new and existing audiences.
“The subconscious translation of one sensory input to another sensory output added a new layer of depth and understanding to the design style”
Music To The Ears
When developing the visual identity, I knew that I wanted to push myself past the more minimal aesthetics that I typically steer toward. As a result, much of the visual inspiration that I pulled from the project leaned more maximalist, with punchy colors and more textured.
During this development stage, I found myself listening to a lot of music with texture and grit (see some above). The music spanned from fuzzy guitars to abrasive synths to bubblegum pop and – in retrospect– it’s really interesting to see how this influenced the visual identity.
The subconscious translation of one sensory input to another sensory output added a new layer of depth and understanding to the design style.
All about texture.
With a more textured and gritty visual style in mind, the typeface VISUAL (AllCaps Type Foundry) is perfect for displays/headings. The pixelated edges for the glyphs play into a glitchy and maximalist effect, and work beautifully in a dynamic or static use.
The palette for the campaign is composed of bright, punchy, contrasted colors that are slightly abrasive and eye-catching. The imagery is strongly tied to the palette, as all images used are desaturated and then have a color applied. Using various blending modes, the gritty textures on the image mixed with the typeface create an ample amount of noise.
Underground,
meet The Underground
The London Underground made for the perfect location for the campaign. It’s a high foot traffic environment that ensures high visibility and exposure for the campaign.
Pitchfork covers a wide range of artists, spanning popularity and genre; some would fall into an “underground” category, which creates a playful tagline for the campaign.
For digital formats, I used existing digital billboards across the London Underground. Using specs from Global Group— an advertising group who designs these billboards— I made both static and dynamic versions of these ads.
Print formats included a series of fly-posters that showcase the vibrant and bold lineup.
The main design initiative took the form of a train car wrap, which boldly features the headlining artists and the festival lineup. Motion was a major consideration when designing this and I had to ensure that the wrap looked enticing both in motion and at a stand still.
