Designed Festival

Adobe Live

A Different Kind of Festival

A fictional campaign that proves branding can go deeper than a poster.

Designed Festival is a conceptual case study developed for Adobe Live On Demand. It imagines a fictional city-wide design exhibition where museums, galleries, and public spaces become part of one massive creative experience. Each venue curates its own take on a central theme, and the festival identity adapts with them.

This project was created to challenge the way most events are branded. A lot of organizations still rely on a single poster, resized into different formats, and plastered across everything. It’s repetitive, static, and doesn’t reflect the scale or energy of a multi-site experience.

Designed Festival asks: what if the branding didn’t just promote the event, but became part of the event itself?

The Concept

Most festival campaigns are built around one key visual. One image. One layout. The result is a stretched-out system that often loses impact the second it leaves the poster frame.

This project flips that. It imagines a flexible brand system built for movement, variation, and depth. One that feels alive across different locations and touchpoints. A system where branding isn’t decoration, but a design experience in itself.

The concept is simple. Let each venue and environment shape how the identity appears, while keeping everything tied together through a cohesive visual framework. The brand doesn’t just sit on top of the festival. It travels through it.

The Process

It started on foot.

I walked through Toronto and photographed walls, textures, signs, and forgotten corners of the city. Those photos became the visual backbone of the project. Using them as references, I built prompts in Adobe Firefly to generate abstract backgrounds inspired by the urban landscape.

These weren’t literal recreations. They were reimagined visuals; tiled walls became layered gradients, brick textures turned into halftones, and bold colour swatches were pulled from real-world details. Once I had the right mix, I upscaled and refined everything in Photoshop.

Next, I used Firefly to generate a custom 3D metallic shape. Sculptural and fluid, this became the signature visual element across all campaign assets. I cleaned it up in Photoshop and used it as a flexible design anchor that could scale across touchpoints.

In Illustrator, I pulled everything together. I designed a suite of posters that worked as a unified system, not just individual layouts.

Touchpoints

The visual system was designed to live across both physical and digital environments.

I mocked up the campaign across public-facing applications like billboards, storefronts, museum signage, and transit ads. Each asset had variation, but the brand remained consistent. The metallic shape and bold type gave the system structure, while the background textures kept it expressive.

To extend the experience, I built remixable social templates in Adobe Express. Attendees could upload a photo, insert a quote, or even add a short video, turning static posts into interactive pieces of the campaign. The 3D shape was animated to float across layouts, giving the visuals energy without overwhelming them.

The result was a campaign that didn’t just advertise the festival. It made space for the audience to be part of it.

Why it Matters

Designed Festival is fictional, but the strategy behind it is very real.

This project was built to show that branding an event doesn’t have to stop at a poster. It can be responsive, layered, and rooted in the environment it lives in. The design system started from real street textures and ended as a flexible, scalable campaign — proving that inspiration doesn’t need to come from a moodboard. It can come from walking outside and paying attention.

If your event lives across different venues, spaces, or screens, your brand system should too.