The Michigan Irish Music Festival is one of the largest Irish music festivals in the midwestern United States, taking place on the third weekend of every September in downtown Muskegon, Michigan.

Through LongerDays, I worked on a number of graphics projects to support the festival, utilizing their branding guidelines to create and update printed and digital materials for each year, including the printed festival program, branded admission tickets, large-format signs for the festival grounds, social media graphics, promotional flyers, t-shirt designs and whatever other graphics projects they'd ask for.

You can check out some of these projects below:

FESTIVAL PROGRAM

The Festival publishes a 20-page event program each year that contains everything you need to know about what's going on at the festival, including parking and admission details, daily performance schedules, details about the various activities and cultural presentations, photos and bios of performing bands and musicians, food and market vendor info, and a section crediting festival sponsors with their logos.

Updating the program involved redesigning the cover artwork (which typically includes a photo of one of the headlining acts), refreshing design elements throughout the program, and updating the content (which often involved editing descriptions of activities to fit the allotted space).

The centerpiece of the festival program is the festival map, which was drawn from an aerial photo of the festival grounds, giving patrons a unique, angled view of the festival that makes it easier to find their way around compared to a traditional, top-down perspective.

ADMISSION TICKETS

Instead of going through a third-party ticketing agency, the festival handles all of its ticketing in house, and publishes its own branded admission tickets that are collected at the entrance gate.

These paper tickets are color coded to make it easy to identify what kind of ticket they are (daily admission, weekend pass, complimentary pass, etc.), and they are redesigned each year so that they are noticeably different from the previous year to prevent patrons from trying to use expired tickets to enter the festival.

Annual redesigns typically involve flipping the design orientation between portrait and landscape, and including unique photos on the back featuring festival artists and activities.

FESTIVAL SHIRTS

I've also had the opportunity to create some t-shirt designs for the Festival. For the most part, these projects involved a lot more creative freedom, eschewing the festival's standard branding for completely unique designs available exclusively for that year.

Some of these were sold as general merchandise, and are double-sided designs that include the dates of the festival and a list of the performing artists from that year's festival on the back, while some of these were issued exclusively to festival volunteers to wear as their "uniform" while on duty, and were printed on brightly colored shirts to make volunteers more easily visible to patrons.

PROMO FLYERS & OTHER MATERIALS

The Festival also produces a bunch of other printed promotional materials to get the word out every year, including printed flyers and discount brochures. These materials usually stick pretty tightly to the branding guidelines, with some minor aesthetic changes year after year.

The examples below include a promotional flyer and rackcard brochures for the 2017 festival, and a "Presenting Sponsorship Summary" outlining all of the various ways in which the festival's presenting sponsors gain promotional exposure through their support of the event.

ST. PATRICK'S PARTY

The Festival also hosts a two-day St. Patrick's Party every March that serves as a fundraiser for the main festival in September. Graphics created for the St. Pat's Party use many of the same branding elements as the main festival, but are often adapted into their own theme to differentiate it:

WHISKEY EXPERIENCE

The Whiskey Experience is a new activity at the festival where people can sign up to participate in a tasting session sampling various Irish whiskeys. Graphics created for the Whiskey Experience include a unique logo inspired by bottle label designs, which was used on shirts, lanyard credentials, and other materials produced for the tastings: