VISUAL SYSTEMS, BRANDING
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
PROMPT
Our class was prompted to create a concept and visual system for a music festival, with free reign on the type of music and audience we wanted to target. CESH Fest was inspired by the historical Bay Area Jazz Scene, specifically within the Fillmore neighborhood in San Francisco.
PHYSICAL ASSETS
CESH Fest's visual system heavily relies on imagery and a limited color palette to create cohesion across different brand elements. Type stands out of the way of the images, and the bright yellow is brought in to add contrast and "pop" to the compositions. The rhythm of the type's contrasting weights calls back to the rhythm and push and pull of jazz music itself.
VISUAL SYSTEM
CESH Fest's visual system 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 imagery I collected to stand out.
I made a significant effort to source photography from the era in which San Francisco's Jazz Scene was at its peak, in the 1940s and 50s. I ran the images through my printer and scanner and manually ripped them up to evoke jazz's spontaneity within the imagery itself.
The name "CESH" comes from a jazz term that describes a voice modulating over a sustained musical note. I chose this term as the festival's name to represent the diversity of jazz and its contributors, and to evoke the unfaltering strength of the jazz community.
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.
PROMOTIONAL VIDEOS
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.