A new look for The WE Festival

The WE Festival is a non-profit organisation and incorporates an annual festival around May, spread through the whole city of Maastricht, with its main focuses on sustainability and community building. The event relies heavily on the works of volunteers, and includes a variety of workshops ranging from dance, juggling and ceramics up to woodworking and yoga, several parties, vegan dinners, pizza baking sessions, and more activities where students can come together, socialise, create memories, and bond.

For the 2017 edition, I took on the role as Head of Design for The WE Festival. The WE Festival needed a new design theme to draw attention from both new potential visitors and already existing festival lovers, and I decided, that it was time that the festival also received a new logo for a whole new visual identity. Henry Alves agreed on designing the new visual identity under my supervision and guidance, and managed to delivered a wonderful result. Aleksas Kateiva and I then worked on the new website for The WE Festival.

The Logo

The old WE Festival logo had a major problem: it always included the year of the festival, e.g. WE14, WE15, WE16 etc. This poses major strains on the coherence role of the logo. A logo should be something that is representative of the brand’s culture and vision, it should remain and not be changed. It should also be catchy and simple to be remembered, but not flat and boring. People involved with The WE Festival make the festival. In order to find out, what the festival stands for, I asked the team to sit down and draw pictures and/or write down words which they associate with The WE Festival. Overall, the terms and pictures which stuck out the most were: community, connectivity, sharing, love, creativity, diversity, fun, culture, sustainability, music, open minds, and generally very warm descriptions.

There was one main requirement for the new logo: it had to involve a hexagon. Within the past years of The WE Festival’s existence, the hexagon shape has established itself as an identifiable element of the festival. Henry came up with the idea of what the Germans call “in sich wandelnde Kreise” for the logo, i.e. circles (represented by hexagons) wandering within. The logo stands for the community spirit of The WE Festival, separate individual hexagon circles existing and working by themselves, but also with each other, and rotating as themselves, but also as a whole in togetherness.

The Design Theme

It was important to me to put a lot of emphasis on the sustainability aspects of the festival. The visual identity of the 2017 edition should focus on pastel-ish colors with a carefully selected color palette, and have an artsy background. It should not have a standard festival look, but stand out individually with a personal touch. Henry decided to go for a texture-based background.

Three different versions of the theme were needed: a main theme, an opening theme, and a closing theme. The main theme’s primary color was green to reflect the sustainability aspect, the opening theme used warm colors (red, orange, pink) to reflect the positive feelings of the opening, and the closing theme used colder colors (violet, blue) to reflect the end of a wonderful experience. The font Rubik was repeatedly used for coherence.

Overall, the visual identity for 2017 perfectly captures the spirit, emotions, moods, and vision of The WE Festival, created both from the official WE Festival’s vision and the input from people who make the festival happen year by year.

The Website

The old WE Festival website was crammed with too much information, and was based on a WP template. I decided that the whole website needed to undergo a change, and got Aleksas on board to help me with the coding part to move away from templates. Henry gave some input for how the website could look like, and sent a first idea. Based on this idea, I fine-tuned the web design pixel-by-pixel, while working closely with Aleksas who was responsible for implementing it from scratch. The purpose of the website is providing adequate information for the visitors about the festival itself, the program, means of contact options, ways of contributing to the festival, as well as administrative information about the Stichting, the sponsors, and the financial background.

Emphasis was put aesthetics, coherence, usability, and informability of the website. First, I had to decide which information is important and which is not. Then I had to organise the information on the website based on this hierarchy of importance. The design process underwent several iterations, in which I constantly asked myself what the user needs to see, wants to see, and what the user will eventually see. Can the user find the information he or she needs quickly? Is the website intuitive to use? Does the website serve its purpose of providing adequate information for the user about the festival?

The website is accessible for both desktop and mobile, and was built responsively. The result is a cleaner look, aligned with the festival’s new visual identity for 2017, and can be further used for the upcoming years.