Turning a festival’s most unpredictable factor into a distinctive visual campaign

Statistics

Client: Into The Great Wide Open

Partners: Studio Bas Koopmans

Awards: Red Dot Design Award – Best of the Best; European Design Award; Communication Arts Design Award

Deliverables: Data-driven campaign

The challenge

When going to a music festival, people make many preparations to plan their days as much as possible. But when the festival is on an island, some factors cannot be controllable and have immense effects on people’s experiences. Weather is one of those factors.

Into The Great Wide Open (ITGWO) is an annual three-day music festival that takes place in Vlieland island, the Netherlands. ITGWO started in 2009 with the ambition to drive change in festival production through sustainability. The festival is recurrently sold-out since its second edition.

CLEVER°FRANKE was invited to collaborate with Studio Bas Koopmans to create a unique visual language for the 2019 edition of the festival. The design uses weather data as the main ingredient despite its uncontrollable nature. Both the design process and results were unknown and that’s what made this visual language distinct.

Value delivered

A unique festival campaign that harnesses the weather data of the festival’s host island, while maintaining an artistic feel that is in harmony with ITGWO.

Background

ITGWO is focused on quality and simplicity, while bringing people from all ages together for a diverse event filled with music, art, literature and film. Each year, the festival decides on a theme that shapes the campaign visuals.

The theme of the 2019 edition was ‘Possible Futures’ to imagine, explore and experiment with a wide range of possible outcomes that the future holds.

Phases and toolkit items used

Concept design & visualization

Data exploration & storytelling

Identity design

Visual design

Research

We started our research by asking:

Can the circumstances on Vlieland influence the form of the campaign through data? How can we use the most uncontrollable element (weather) to create a holistic approach and consistent visuals?

A music festival on an island is highly dependent on the weather conditions: it is a substantial part of the ambience. Is the weather nice or is it raining? Is the wind blowing hard during my boat ride? These circumstances can all be traced back to numbers. To data. And we used this data as input for the campaign.

Solution

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Postergenerator

We created a poster generator based on the weather data of Vlieland. This data determined the composition and elements on the poster, while maintaining an artistic feel that is in harmony with the festival itself.

Over time, the generator produced a variety of compositions, giving insights on the dramatic weather changes upon and surrounding the island. Try out the poster generator yourself here