Event Horizon

WELL, it’s been a minute but I’m back to put more word nuggets to your beautiful eye orbs. This time I’ll talk about the process of teeing up and drilling my largest project down the fairway (obligatory sports reference to seem manly). First and foremost, I must thank Crystal Eyo, a co-worker and friend from my Concordia days. She approached me with this opportunity and went to bat for me to land this once in a lifetime gig. So THANK YOU CRYSTAL!!!

With this post, I’d like to give you some pearls about how this kind of job differs from that of a straight branding project.

After confirming that I snagged the job in late December, I formulated questions for a meeting with the head directors, Managing Director Nikola Tonn and Artistic Director David Horak. I tend to ask the same questions for every project because this gives me a good baseline of how the client sees their project. What was clear to me through this meeting were three things; since this may be their last year under the giant tent, they really wanted that incorporated and emphasized; they wanted a fun, family-friendly feeling; and they wanted it to feel like ‘summer’. I boiled it down in a single sentence to “Summer in the Park”; the park being Hawrelak Park in Edmonton, Alberta.

Keeping It Fresh

The main question was “how do we keep this fresh and interesting to people and maintain the family fun all the while being very literal about ‘Summer in the Park’”. For the answer, I looked to our annual personal illustrated Christmas card. 

Examples of our past three years of custom Christmas Cards

This idea came about when Caitlin wanted to send out Christmas cards and I had a (not so) low-key hate for those generic cards that then just get tossed out. My solution to this was to over-stress and overwork myself in order for people to remember our cards and possibly have a talking piece for their guests every year. I’ve received an awful lot of positive feedback about my cards and a lot of “it’s the card we wait to get”. To be fair, it is usually late because Caitlin is skilled at procrastinating, so maybe that’s the reason, too. Regardless, one of the things I’m most proud of with these cards is that we have a variety of characters, so it keeps it fresh while maintaining the “branding” of what makes a Clarke Christmas Card.

Luckily, the “Shakespeare-verse”, as I have now coined it, has a plethora of great, interesting characters as well. I married these two ideas together to push the thought of ‘what if these characters existed in the actual park during summer?’ This idea allows us great flexibility with the concept. We can have multiple posts with different changing characters to keep interest in the posts high, as well as really represent the amphitheatre and park in an illustrated poster. 

But first, I needed proof of concept and to get their approval, as this is a lot of work ahead and the last thing we want is an unhappy client with something they didn’t ask for.

A World Designed

For some reason, a Shakespeare relaxing in short shorts with super hairy legs stuck in my head. It is effective at grabbing the audience’s attention as one has likely never seen this Shakespeare before. This was the first sketch I pushed out as I had to get it out of my head before it became corrupted by others and I forgot it. 

The earliest sketch of Shakespeare chilling.

After researching different examples of foliage illustration, I made the tree illustration as a concept as how the park could look with reference to the tree-line image of Hawrelak Park. 

An example of the foliage within Hawrelak Park.

An early example of how I saw the trees would look within the illustration.

Next up was how to incorporate the giant amphitheatre into a layout that really emphasizes it. With the centralized image, it really puts emphasis on the structure while keeping the information highlighted. The angular concept really gave an interesting and dynamic feel to the layout. It almost felt comforting, as though the points were arms welcoming you in. In the end, the directors liked the way the crowd looked with the pathway, but really liked the feeling of the angular tent.

After approval of the concept, I moved forward to full digital illustration of the tent, Shakespeare and the treeline for this rough base poster.

A very rough digital poster to show the rough layout of the poster.

Rise of the Shakespeare-verse

While I was awaiting any edits on the idea, I began the other characters. For example, I knew one of the plays featured this year was A Midsummer Nights’ Dream, which features a man with a donkey head named Nick Bottom. Initially, I started looking for reference photos of donkey heads that would work. I came to the conclusion we either do a laughing donkey or a sad one. After a brief discussion, the sad one was chosen. The next problem was how to put a sad donkey headed man into this park and why was he sad. My next connection was that this man full of hair would be hot on a summer’s day, so he should be cooling down, and what better way than with ice cream. This also solved the question of “Why was the donkey sad?” Because his ice cream fell! From there, I looked for reference photos and begin sketching until I ended up with a refined image like the one below.

Initial sad donkey sketch.

This thought was given to all of the Shakespearean characters. Romeo and Juliet looked like their 90s film counterparts and held goblets instead of glasses. The witches all had different kinds of jumpsuits but all by the same company with its own unique logo. The relaxed nun wearing red stilettos. Each vignette had its own small details hidden within each character illustration for the viewers to find.

The small details in each character illustration.

Finish the Puzzle

With this large project, deciding on the visual concept is just the beginning. There are many other considerations to ponder. What kind of colour palette do we use? What kind of typography do we utilize? Is it versatile enough? How will this affect social media posts? How can we incorporate this into a program, merchandise and advertisements? For the two major questions of colour and typography, I went back to the idea of “Summer in the Park”. For colour, I knew we had to keep it with a natural colour as in summer, there is nothing better than a deep blue sky mixed with lush greens. Typography-wise, this “Summer in the Park” theme took me to the idea of summer camps and how they mixed a thick sans serif with a loose and flowy script. It took some searching, but I finally reached something I was happy to present. To be honest I had over 20 versions with different type choices in my illustrator file that I had to delete because it kept crashing my 10 year old desktop. After many back and forth, we reached a final design for the poster which is below.

Full final poster for the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

Design in Action

Following the final decision on the poster, I had to incorporate the poster design decision into other media pieces for promotion. Pieces that include advertisements, social media posts for Facebook and Instagram, news stories, and a full 40-page program listing sponsors, full cast with biographies and sponsorship advertisements; a t-shirt design commemorating what may be the last festival at this iconic location; a fan-favourite of unique branded boxer shorts; and finally, my own creation and pitch to fully utilize the illustration and characters in an Activity Book for all ages with a maze, word searches, colouring pages and festival bingo.

In Closing

To summarize “how does this project differ from a branding project?”; it’s about fitting the form. With a branding project, you’re taking a feeling and creating a brand to represent the feeling. All of the branded pieces that come afterwards are designed to fit within the specific parameters of the brand. With an event project, you’re taking a real life event and having to wrap your branding around it to push the feelings and expectations for the viewers. So if you think of it in physical forms, it’s something like an onion. Branding is working inwards out; you create the core and the layers on top. Event branding is the opposite; working outwards in, you create a poster, then advertisements, then social media posts, then a program in order to build into the centre, which is the event itself.

As I write this in late June I look back to early January on the immense amount of work that was done between Crystal, Nikola, David and I to market this event, I am truly grateful to Nikola and David for the opportunity and the experience, as well as their direction. I am grateful to Crystal for bringing me into this project and being a filter for creatives to accurately market their unique talents.  

Thank you to Freewill Shakespeare Festival again and a humongous THANK YOU to those of you who have supported me in this crazy business idea. I hope to bring you more craziness in the future.