Lincoln Calling is a local music festival in Lincoln, NE.

The team had hired designer and illustrator Audrey Farnham and she brought me in for Art Direction, Web Design and Merchandise Design.

The project required coming up with a fresh take on the 2020 Lincoln Calling branding which was space themed. This was a fun and unique project to take on, but it was on a very short timeline of only a few months to execute the revitalized branding.

Tasked with bringing the Lincoln Calling art and branding in a new direction, I started brainstorming right away. With the on-going pandemic there is a general surreal feeling permeating our society with the continued disconnection and isolation. Are we all aliens going about our everyday lives? Sometimes it feels that way. So for the Lincoln Calling 2021 festival I proposed the visual direction be space/aliens mixed with everyday Earthly objects.

Moving forward with the Surrealist Space concept, we decided another way to differentiate the 2021 branding from previous years would be to use gradients instead of only flat colors. I began fleshing out announcement poster ideas as Audrey started creating the look-and-feel of the illustration for Lincoln Calling 2021.

After establishing the Surrealist Space concept, new color palette, and use of gradients, Audrey moved forward with creating the Lincoln Calling announcement poster and illustrating the new characters, and I moved forward with overhauling the look-and-feel of the website.

Below is a video walkthrough of the LincolnCalling.com site as it looked during the festival.

Audrey created masterful illustrations and posters for the festival that expanded the Surreal Space theme. Below is the announcement poster and the line-up poster Audrey illustrated and designed.

For the festival merch I took our complex vector illustrations and reduced them to 2-4 color palettes and cleaned up the vector layers to be easier for screenprinting. We worked directly with Relentless Merch, a local print shop that works with national brands, bands, and tours.

We had several last minute changes to the festival line-up due to the on-going Covid pandemic and we had to quickly turnaround merch designs that didn’t include the band line-up, but still were engaging designs that incorporated our festival branding.

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