Choka Music Festival
Choka is a two day Kiwiana music festival based in Wellington, New Zealand. The idea behind creating this event is that I wanted to create a community based music festival which celebrates our diverse kiwi culture and talent and is accessible to all people. I will briefly take you through the process I went through to create my final brand identity.
My primary target audience for this project are New Zealanders, people who are musicians and want a career in music, millennial age people, people with siblings, living and studying in Wellington.
My style words for this project were: Handmade, Rustic, Kiwiana. It was very important for me to capture the look and feel of our New Zealand culture so that all people would feel welcome at this event. I started playing off-screen with Linocutting, a printmaking technique which creates a rustic look. The artifacts created from the linocut fit very well with my intended style direction so it was very important that I kept them.
My initial wordmark concepts were very vast. I took inspiration from many kiwiana sources, such as album covers from the 70s & 80s, nature and Marmite! I further developed the top right wordmark, which has the face of a Hei Tiki, a Maori cultural symbol for protection and luck.
My refinements for the wordmark included playing around with different textures, such as wood to imitate wood carving and cracked pavement.
My poster concepts is where I hit a bit of a roadblock. The problem I identified is that I was getting too tunnel visioned and spending too much time looking at a screen. So in order to combat this, I spent a day off screen, printing of a lot of different newspapers, textures and colours. I was very happy with the results and this gave me a very clear path to creating my final.
I was feeling very positive about my project at this point. I was receiving helpful feedback which led me to create my final poster design. I decided to create my own newspaper texture with kiwi slang on it. I also scaled the yellow down so the poster had a nice frame. I made the lineup text smaller so it wasn't a focal feature and wasn't competing with the title. I used a lot of kiwi slang on my final design which suits my style.
