American Family Housing approached G3 Creative to create an event logo and marketing materials for its inaugural Summer festival. The event helps raise funds for their Homeless to Hope to Homes programs. First, the festival needed an identity and naming the event was the first task. It would be a Watermelon Festival, a Summer festival, and a KCBS-sanctioned professional BBQ competition. After numerous name submissions, AFH chose “Ribs, Pigs & Watermelons – Summer Festival & Pro BBQ Competition.” With the event now having a name, it was time to have some fun creating the festival event logo.
The festival needed a fun event logo in line with similar types of festivals. Other BBQ festivals we researched sometimes used a playful illustration of a cow or pig, so we thought this direction was great given the event’s name. Initial sketch ideas showed a pig and a cow in a watermelon patch but needed a unique spin. Half serious and half joking, we thought it would be fun if the bull was cooking sausage links and the pig was cooking a steak. The result was the BBQ dueling pig & bull illustration. The complete event logo soon came together with the addition of the watermelon illustration and colorful typography.
The initial drawings of the pig, bull, and watermelon were pencil-sketched, inked, and scanned. Once in Adobe Photoshop, the image outlines were redrawn digitally using a tablet. The final black outlines were brought into Adobe Illustrator and were live-traced into vector art. All of the colorizing and typography were created in Adobe Illustrator for the final logo. Since it was all vector graphics, we were able to use the event logo for large applications such as a 30-foot wide street banner, tuck-side advertising, banners and posters. Also, the Illustrator file allowed us to separate the file into eight Pantone® colors for the full-color T-shirt and a two-spot color option for printing on Pink T-shirts for the festival staff and volunteer crew.
All festival materials were well-branded with the event logo and support graphics. Additional items designed for the event by G3 Creative included postcards, flyers, posters, program, web banner ads, digital message boards, vehicle graphics, T-shirts, banner stands, booth signs, event passes, BBQ competition voting cards and game booth signs.
Need help with a custom logo for your event? Contact G3 Creative, and let’s discuss your event branding strategies.
