Theo DrescherGraphic Designer
Ridge Rhythm Revival
main poster used for branding and merchandising.
example stickers for merchandising.commemorative t-shirt featuring the design from that year’s poster.
For this project, the brief was to build out complete branding for a fictional music festival, including a logo, poster, and merchandise. I chose bluegrass, one of my favorite genres, and built the identity around a full moon rising over a mountain ridge, a scene that also nods to the genre's rustic, outdoorsy roots.
The poster leans into a vintage, hand-touched feel to match that rustic-ness. Cool blues and purples set a summer-night mood, while the warm gold of the moon and the lettering that mirrors it pull the eye straight to the center of the composition.
My first pass at the logo used a banjo shape as the primary icon, but on review the neck's angle created an awkward silhouette that didn't read clearly at a glance, and didn’t properly capture the look and feel of a proper music festival with its own, unique identity. I moved away from that concept toward a wordmark built from 'RRR
" with the moon nested between the letters and a mountain ridge running through as negative space. This version reads clearly at a glance and holds up at small sizes, which made it easy to extend into a full system: a primary logo with the full festival name, a simplified icon for smaller applications, and a badge version for patches or stickers. I also built out a light and dark colorway for each, along with a defined color palette, so the whole brand stays consistent no matter where it's applied.
That same mark carried through to the merchandise. The sticker set reworks the wordmark into a set of playful color variations paired with illustrated banjo headstocks, and the t-shirt extends the poster's night-sky illustration across the back, so everything in the system feels like part of the same world.