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IMMERSIVE A 2020 Thesis Process Book Designed & Written by Aly Kaye
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Fine Arts, Maine College of Art, Portland Maine, May 11, 2020 Major in Graphic Design. Copyright Š 2020 Maine College of Art All rights reserved by the respective author. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Designed by Aly Kaye Designed using Adobe InDesign CC 2019. Typefaces: Signo & Chaparral Pro
I’d like to thank: everyone who helped me through this journey and kept me motivated and inspired. Thank you to my friends, family, partner, and professors.
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The Beginning The part in which I dove in head first and tried to figure out what the heck to do.
Making The part where I think I figured it out and just started to create.
The End? The part of chaos. This is where things went crazy and unexpected.
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The start of a project is always exciting, but the large scale of this thesis was overwhelming. I was excited to create but was unsure of where to start. 10
The first assignment we received was to create large posters with the constraints of being in black and white and having only text and form. I used this project as a way to explore aesthetic choices and to help myself understand exactly what I wanted to do. What is the intent of this project? Why would this matter?
In the end, I landed on a few key terms: intervention, design, experience. The final prompt evolved into, “How might we intervene on the music festival experience through design?�
These three images are my first initial sketches. I wanted to just make and see where not thinking could lead me.
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The two final poster designs. These lead me to the grainy, brush that eventually is worked into the logo.
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After coming to terms with deciding on why I was doing what I was, I needed to do a lot of research. Throughout the process the research has not stopped, but this initial step helped me to learn about the history of festivals and how designers brand festivals in a contemporary age. I have been to a couple festivals and I had the ability to use my own experience in conjunction with my research. From my initial perspective, I needed to remember what I was experiencing, both good and bad, as an attendee and
in a design mindset. What emotions was I feeling? How was the wayfinding? What attracted me to a specific festival? Is it just the music, or the design, or even the additional events? Using these questions for myself, I expected to be able to walk through the maze of how to brand a festival and how to deal with the dilemmas I personally experienced.
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Images of Camp Bisco and Bassnectar Curated Events. These found images helped to inspire my color palettes and the mood of the logo and future identity.
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“Music festival posters allowed for events to identify its experiential qualities and ideologies with a potential audience before it happens.” In my research, I learned a lot about the history of festivals. I also noticed how important design was to festivals. Even back in 1954, the Newport Jazz Festival, which was just beginning, relied on designers and artists for posters. The posters they designed were abstract and often saturated with color. They embodied the feeling of jazz music within these designs by off-centering the type and shapes or using lines to create movement. The posters almost seemed to dance and burst with energy.
Music festival posters allowed for events to identify its experiential qualities and ideologies with a potential audience before it happens. Even with the Woodstock poster and the design choices behind that, it mirrored the festival’s thoughts and ideas about peace and equality. The minimalistic illustrations of the dove, the equal size of attending bands listed without hierarchy, and the title ‘3 Days of Peace & Music’ all scream the event’s ideologies. Design made it possible to visualize the music and the experience before a festival even happened.
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To begin the making process, I needed something to build the brand off of. I began sketching for the logo and running through different ideas. I knew that I wanted the general brand to be an abstract feeling. I wanted it promote excitement and good energy. Whenever an idea sparked I tried my best to sketch it out and later on try to see how it could work digitally refined. The first motifs that I had tested were clouds and a sun and gradated circles. These concepts didn’t excite me, and by imagining how I would react to this logo as a festival attendee, it didn’t spark excitement for me.
I really wanted to play around with type and see what I could do with type as a form alone. This led me to what I would eventually land on. I used a simple sans serif that I could easily manipulate and tested out how to shift those letter forms to create tension and abstractness while still maintaining legibility. To further expand the identity, I used elements of curved lines and circles so that I could have more assets to work with when expanding out the identity. This concept gave both me as a designer and a festival goer excitement.
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Beginning of exploration for the Immersive Festival app design.
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One of the touchpoints that I had wanted to improve upon was the mobile app designs for festivals. I find that they often feel outdated and are confusing to use. My goal was to simplify the usage and still allow for personal features, such as creating your own schedule. I originally wanted to include an interactive map as well.
Unfortunately with the stress of thesis, I was unable to do all that I had planned with this app design. I was unable to explore the addition of certain features and because of that this was not as successful as it might have been.
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The area that I was most excited for was merchandise design. It was an area that I didn’t want to focus on heavily but wanted to explore anyways. I created a few t-shirt mockups and also designed how wristbands at this festival could look. It was fun to see how different elements from the identity could come together on these elements. In the wristband mockups, I utilized the color of the branding to separate different types of tickets, while keeping the same logo on the front. This allows for easy identification of the passes. If this exploration were to go further, creating pin and hat designs would be my next steps and also refining these t-shirt concepts.
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Immersive t-shirt design, utilizing both the circle and line motifs. Festival wristband mockups that showcase how color can be used to separate different types of passes.
CAMPING
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STAGE
STAGE
STAGE
PARKING
All throughout this process, my main goal was to simplify information while also making it more easily available. One big portion of making simplified information is icons. Icons allow for a person to quickly glance at something and understand a deeper concept. For example, an icon with a fork and spoon easily and simply signifies food. These set of icons utilized the circle motif and simple icons. They are organized by color to signify what type of information it is. Magenta is food related, blue is event, and yellow is general information. These icons would exist on many different scales and I made the decision to keep them as simple as possible so that they could be still read at a small scale.
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This year presented a lot of challenges, both internally and externally. The major challenge was the global pandemic of covid-19. In March 2020, this new virus began to spread rapidly and eventually spread into the US. This put a lot of people out of work and school to help control the spread. During our spring break in mid-March, it was announced that meca would have an extended break of two additional weeks to survey the situation. By the end of these two weeks, meca announced that the remainder of this year would be performed through online learning.
Being a graduating senior in the midst of thesis, this was hard to accept and deal with. The already difficult nature of completing a thesis project, grew much more hard to handle. This pandemic has affected everyone, no matter who they are. Taking this difficult time and learning how to work around it was a special situation that only we will have.
& with that, 2020 school year came to an unfortunate end. But we take this circumstance and learn from it.
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