CESH FEST
VISUAL SYSTEMS, BRANDING, WEB DESIGN
CESH Fest is a jazz music festival that honors the improvisational jazz tradition and jazz’s roots as an art form that comes from cross collaboration and spontaneity. The festival is an open call for celebratory cultural production that humanizes and sustains spirit.
TOOLS
Figma
Illustrator
After Effects
Premiere Pro
COURSE
Visual Systems
CLIENT
UW Design
DURATION
Seven Weeks, Solo
Introducing CESH Fest
CESH Fest's brand is strongly based in references to the Bay Area and its historical and current jazz scene. The festival's logo's crossbars reference the many bridges connecting cities across the bay—especially the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. I chose to strongly limit the color palette to black, yellow, and white and use a basic sans serif typeface to allow the historical imagery that marks the brand stand out.
CESH Fest's Website
CESH Fest's website is crisp and easily readable, yet brings in moments of torn black and white imagery to call back to the physical elements of the brand system (and the rough, quick musicality of jazz).
Promoting the festival
The bumper for CESH Fest continues the visual motif of ripping paper, while the promotional video brings in a mix of archival and recent jazz footage to emulate the visual mix present in the branding system. Both videos respond to the notes and tones of the music they are set to, reinforcing the festival's subject matter.
Visual System
Much of CESH Fest's visual system relies on the use of historical imagery from the days of San Francisco's Fillmore Jazz scene. I treated the imagery by creating sepia-toned duotones and running the photos through my printer to hand-rip them, so they exuded a strong vintage feeling. The ripping motif extends across all brand elements.
Takeaways
CESH Fest allowed me to lean into my love of physical making in the design process—those moments where your creativity is sparked by the process of sitting on your floor manically ripping up pieces of paper and running them through your scanner. I'm super happy with my development of CESH Fest's brand identity into its website and video applications, and hope to do more work like that in the future.