WHOLE Festival 2024

After the big success of the 2023 edition, I had the pleasure to work one more time on the creative direction and design for WHOLE Festival 2024.

The theme for the 2024 edition was based on the aesthetic of childhood games of the ‘80s and ‘90s. Miniature models, plastic toys, the Rubik cube and iconic games such as Monopoly and Scrabble became the main inspiration of the new communication campaign.

The festival site is treated as this massive board game where everything is possible and it’s always time to play. The tagline “Shall we play?” works both as a reference to the gaming experience and yet as an invitation to join the festival journey.

Given the hectic rhythms of the communication campaign, the new visual guidelines had to be easily translatable into tangible design assets and yet maintain consistency with the storytelling behind the design.

Rather than relying on a single accent color, I opted for five equally distributed ones throughout the visual campaign. This decision was conceptually driven by a symbolic desire of creating a welcoming and diverse environment, where everyone feels equally accepted.

The two key objectives of the communication strategy were:

1. Design a clear, straightforward layout for festival guests, enabling them to easily manage various pieces of information, such as the line-up, routes, practical instructions, program changes, and more.
2. Create design templates for digital and print campaigns that are easy for the festival’s internal team to manage under tight deadlines while maintaining consistency throughout the communication campaign.

To achieve these goals, I created a mixed set of graphic assets that could be used and combined flexibly. The set included the 3D elements previously designed for the board game model, now exported as 2D graphics, the archive photos from past festival editions, and a series of 2D illustrations inspired by the festival and camping experience.

The core element of the new identity project was the strong connection between the festival’s logomark—a perfect diamond — and the top view of a Monopoly board. The logo became the foundation for our custom game board, filled with tents, surreal creatures, the iconic excavators of the festival site, dinosaurs, and much more.
The new site needed to be user-friendly, showcasing the festival program and information while offering a real-time overview of the lineup during the festival; in addition to designing the main website, I collaborated with the platform Eventix team to seamlessly integrate their external ticket webpage. To maintain the illusion of continuous navigation, I used an i-frame to replicate the main website’s menu design also after leaving the native website.