So the weekend’s over and we had a blast at the Famously Hot Music Festival! This project was so much fun to be a part of. The Famously Hot Music Festival was a three-day music festival featuring a different genre of music each day in downtown Columbia, SC. The line-up included Collective Soul, Buckcherry, Filter, Seven Mary Three, Eve 6, EOTO, Savoy, Eliot Lipp, Lonestar, Pat Green, Corey Smith and Julie Roberts. Red to Gray worked with Dave Stewart/SS Productions to create an identity package, website, promotional materials including posters and postcards, advertising, merchandise, festival collateral, stage scrims and signage. We also provided media assistance, social media management and analytics analysis.

The official marketing campaign meme for the Columbia Visitor’s Bureau is “Columbia – Famously Hot” developed by ADCO. The festival organizer wanted to use “Famously Hot” as the theme to create some consistency with other like-named events that happen throughout the year. We wanted to create a logo that would work for different genres of music but represent a progressive music festival. The logo above was created in conjunction with the iconic logo to the right to establish the identity but provide flexibility for all of the pieces that have to be created for a project this size.

The process began in late May 2012 and the festival ran Friday, August 24th – Sunday, August 26th so we had to move pretty quick. We worked on the identity package first and then developed the web presence including social media. Next came the advertising and posters. We finished off by developing the merchandise, festival collateral, stage scrims and signage.

The social media and analytics components were used extensively to communicate key messages and to evaluate the effectiveness of certain marketing efforts including print, radio and television advertising. Social media including Twitter and Facebook was used on the days of the festival to communicate with festival-goers and the artists performing. By the end of the festival we had grown our Facebook “Reach” to over 170,000 and over 1500 likes.

The world will end on December 21, 2012.

Well, that’s according to believers that the Maya’s “Long Count” calendar predicts the end of civilization, and some killer Holiday parties, as we know it.

There’s some pretty crazy stuff that lines up on that date. December 21st at 11:11 p.m. marks the exact date and time that the sun will be aligned with the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years. 26,000 YEARS! Do you know what’s about 26,000 light years away from earth? The galactic center. And do you know what’s at the galactic center? The Milky Way and a black hole 4 million times the mass of our sun.

Let me break that down for you. Astronomers and scientists with really big telescopes are seeing what happened in the Milky Way 26,000 years ago. So on the 26,000th anniversary of the alignment of the earth, sun and Milky Way, 12/21/2012, the sun will be blocking our view of the ginormus black hole as it sucks us into deep space. Well, at least that’s what I would be writing about if I had a book deal and a deadline. But since I don’t, here’s another theory a little more coincidental.

Have you ever designed a calendar? I mean all 365 days, or 366 if you were lucky to work on one for 2012? It’s a pain! Just imagine designing one that had to include over 5000 days with no numbers. Instead of easy strokes of the modern numerical system, you had 20 complex symbols that represented each day. And by the way, computers don’t exist so you have to carve these out of stone.

All I’m saying is if I were the ancient design intern sitting in the dark with only a few candles to light a gigantic hunk of stone and my bloody knuckles, I would have used every ounce of persuasion I had to get the art director guards to understand that a calendar is just as good with 5,126 days as it would be with 7,200. “Hey fellas, we’re not going to be around that long anyways. Am I right or what?” Not exactly the same as discussing the nuances of sans vs. serif with the higher-ups. Like most art directors they would have given me a death stare and walked away. In this case I probably would have gotten a promotion as the next sacrifice to the gods. But do you think they would have finished the job for me? Heck no!

They would have gone to the creative director and said the calendar is finished. Thus giving us a calendar that was only 5,126 days long. Merely coincidence that it falls on the same day as this crazy alignment with a gigantic black hole some 26,000 light years away.

The moral of the story: don’t let tedious design work get you down. It could always be worse. Your laziness may just be interpreted as the end of the world a few 1000 years down the road.

 www.liquidsc.com

Carolina Homegrown Music Festival was an event that brought together some of the most talented bands from South Carolina. Band’s like Crossfade, Villanova (Weaving the Fate), Isabelle’s Gift, Justin Smith and the Folk Hop Band and Treadmill Trackstar. The festival organizer wanted to create something that would use the Palmetto tree and the quarter moon, South Carolina’s state flag imagery, in a new and interesting way.

Services Included: Copywriting, Branding/Logo Design, Poster Design, Postcard Design, Printing