Westerville Music and Arts Festival

Our second project instructed the class to create and identity for the annual Westerville Music and Arts Festival. We needed to make a logo, poster and t-shirt design that highlighted the fine arts side of the festival, while still display the other aspects of the festival. I began with a few sketches of random things associated with music and with arts separately, such as different instruments, staffs, music notes, and paint brushes, paint, palettes, and other such things. I struggled putting the two subjects together, but eventually created three different logo possibilities.

 

The first option had several elements that I liked such as the red box working as a container and a text, but I felt like the logo still needed work with all the extra negative space and how the "Westerville Area Chamber of Commerce" stuck out and did not flow with the rest of the logo. the second and third options had more promise, but I decided upon the second option. I changed a few elements after I scanned the image in by taking the idea of a container holding the text from the first logo and making the logo only have two fonts instead of three. 

This logo uses a hand drawn font for the word "Arts" and Century Gothic for the other words. The sans serif, more streamlined font of Century Gothic helped provide contrast  for "Arts", allowing it to stand out as the most important elements of the logo and the festival itself. I chose the colors for their brightness and contrast against each other. Combined with the brown of the background, the three colors provide a warm, fun, summer feel that embodies the time and purpose of the festival. I then created a black and white version of the logo to cater to the needs of the client.

Now that the logo was done, I could move on to the poster and t-shirt designs. After throwing out a first attempt at a poster, I reverted back to one of the first sketches I'd done for the project, which looked more like poster designs than logos anyway. This design feature half of an instrument and half of a paint palette. I adapted that to fit the paintbrush and violin of my logo. I kept the design for the poster fairly simple and used a serif font Baskerville Old Face to provide contrast against the Century Gothic font of the rest of the poster.

I was not sure how to tackle the t-shirt design at first seeing as I had several options. I could have used my logo and simply added the extra bits of information needed, or I could take parts of the logo, or use more of the poster design. I ended up deciding on using the text from the logo and add the rest of the information using Century Gothic once again. I made the text white with the turquoise color as a possible t-shirt color. The client wanted bright colors and this color would be perfect for standing out in a crowd. The design could also be placed on a tye-dye shirt as the client wanted, with the font in the white to contrast the tye-dye.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with the end results of the project. I think I have successfully highlighted the arts aspect of the festival as well as the fun feel of the event.