Aliens is a brand identity for a music festival in Baltimore as a platform for Asian bands and solo artists to promote their music to wider audiences.

Music genre: various (indie/pop/rock)
Concept: expressiveness/spontaneity
Typeface: century gothic

Design prompt: build an identity system for a music festival. The deliveries include festival’s name, logo, location, type system, posters, merchandise items, landing page website, environmental design, motion graphics for social media.

Mentor: Jeff Glendenning

Software: Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effect

Problem: Until recently, when k-pop started to have more influence in the states, people started to give foreign songs more recognition. Before that, the majority of Americans mostly listen to English songs.

Objective: Holding a concert where unfamiliar bands and soloists from many country backgrounds share their stories and culture through music.

name explained

“Aliens” has two meanings:
1. foreigners (the bands and artists) from different countries coming to the States to perform
2. creatures from outer space coming to invade the States with their unique music

moodboard

The concept is expressiveness and spontaneity. The moodboard includes inspirational pictures with brush strokes and ink drops with color accents.

logo

The concept of expressiveness and spontaneity is best captured with the image of ink drops from the moodboard. By taking inspiration from this, Alien’s identity gets simplified through stages.

The simplified ink drop version is now applied to the logo and the typeface using the same idea. There are variations of the same letter throughout the whole type system to express the diversity of languages and genres. The hot pink represents passion, joy, and refreshing.

type system

The custom typeface of Century Gothic with the ink-drop pattern appears throughout the rest of the concert identity. In addition, some of the same letters have multiple versions to express the diversity of the music festival.

posters/ wild posting

At first, the posters are not balanced in distributing the information. One has all of the info, and the others are bland. After some iterations, the information redistributed equally for each poster to get a nice balance between the three:

1. photo of the artists, a tagline, and the logo
2. location and time
3. name of the artists

merchandise (tote/t-shirt)

The first version of the merchandise only has the logo of the concert on it, which is a bit too boring. The logo on the tote bag’s final design is replaced with the concert’s lineup.