Project Brief
Each year, Seattle is home to the Seattle Queer Film Festival—a festival showcasing the latest in queer feature films and shorts. The festival has a new theme each year and 2019 happened to be the 50th anniversary of the Stone Wall riots, which Three Dollar Bill Cinema wanted to use as inspiration for their theme of inclusivity.
Graphic Designer
Ben McCarthy, Three Dollar Bill Cinema
Process
I met with the client to discuss initial design concepts and the team was on board with the options I suggested. Due to time constraints I went directly into creating high-fidelity mockups of the poster options.
The client loved the options I initially provided but found an inspiration image that they preferred, and wanted to take elements from my initial designs and blending them in this new design. We collaborated on a five rounds of revisions and finally landed on this look and feel—using queer elements and vibrant tones to really drive home queer inclusivity.
From the approved look, I created various sizes of posters, magnets, and film passes for each category of festival goer. The poster was used as a general style guide with color, icon elements, and fonts, to be used across the digital and web experience created by the in-house team.
The bulk of my work aside from the general branding of the festival, was to create the 54 page program guide. The guide included event donor and credit pages, sponsor ads, detailed film bios, images, and highlights, festival venue map, and pop-out film schedule for the two-week event.
Results
I received wonderful feedback from the client and their team about the festival branding, specifically the program guide. The client also loved the typographic layout of ‘Seattle Queer Film Festival’ block in the designs that they requested to adopt it as the festival's permanent logo.