Brand · Campaign · Event Design
SEE's 40th annual concert series needed a full campaign identity. I built it from scratch. Then I rebuilt it in five days.
Art Attack ↗ is UMD's longest-running concert series, produced by Student Entertainment Events, the principal student programming board on campus. For the 40th edition, Art Attack XL, SEE went larger than before: two nights, two headliners, at Ritchie Coliseum. I was the sole designer, brought in to build the campaign identity from nothing.
"Nothing" is literal. SEE had their logo, their social templates, and two artist headshots. Everything else, the wordmark, the color system, the visual language, the merch, the full promotional suite, I built from scratch. It also ended up being two campaigns: the first built around Grammy-nominated artists Victoria Monét and Smino, the second for a revsied event when one of the days unexpectedly got cut.
SEE's direction was simple: build the branding from scratch, two headshots, and the knowledge that this was the 40th Art Attack, so it had to feel like a milestone. Victoria Monét and Smino are different sonically, but I saw a shared smoothness between Monet's glamorous and shimmery photo, and Sminos cooler and 'retro-forward'.
According to contract, none of the headshots could be severly altered in my proccess. I was also thinking about the audience. A college crowd is diverse, so I wanted something glamorous without being princess-y, cool without being cold. That tension shaped most of the decisions.
Glamorous but not princess-y. Cool but not cold. That was the brief I gave myself.
The centerpiece of the campaign is the AAXL logo: a letterform built from geometric shapes assigned to each of the starting letters in Art Attack and the roman numeral XL (40). I wanted to create something clean, bold, and modern, but still with a sense of fun and movement.
For the main colors, I wanted to reflect both of the artists while still blending together a scheme that would read well across an audience for 40,000 different students with different backgrounds.
I thought teal reads as cool and more masculine, while purple sits adjacent to glamour without being overtly feminine. Together, they hit something I'd describe as shimmery and inclusive. The gradient version, teal bleeding into purple, was what ended up on the shirt and in a special variety of the logo used mostly in physical print (outside of apparel).
The wordmark and color system — the two things everything else built from.
Color and type — the full visual system.
For the posters, I layered the artist photography directly into the identity. The type and images work as one composition rather than a headline sitting on top of a photo. The result felt more editorial than many of my other SEE posters; I give the criteria for any poster to be something I'd be comfortable displaying on my wall, which I hoped would be the case for the students who also picked on up.
The shirt, pin, and other merchandise extended those same motifs: the interlocking mark, the gradient, a flowy quality in the secondary elements.
Individual artist posters
A week before the event, we had to unexpectedly scrap our Victoria Monét performance, and I had roughly five days instead of the usual two months to pivot the entire campaign into a Pop Hits Dance Party: crowd-voted playlist, giveaways, mocktails, glow merch. My job was to make this feel like a genuine event, not a cancellation notice.
I kept the same wordmark, color system, and sense of motion, but shifted the tone toward a design language I knew I could easily insert any headshot, graphic, or last-minute incorporation that was thrown at me while the programmers reworked the event.
One of my biggiest indicators off sucess is seeing my design work worn willingly in public, and that became a constant occurance with the T-Shirt. I'll be at the gym and spot the shirt on someone, or it'll show up in an Instagram story. That only happens if it's genuinely good-looking enough to wear after the night is over, and I think that's because the shirt worked the same way the whole identity did: the gradient, the mark, the flowy quality of the design all translated to fabric like it was always going to be a shirt, not a poster printed on one.
The numbers tracked: roughly 4,000 likes on the launch post, one of the highest Art Attack has seen, and 10,000 daily impressions, almost entirely organic and on-campus.
