Designing for Star City Nights: BTS

Sooo… something really cool happened.

Earlier this year, I was honored (and honestly completely shocked) to be chosen as the designer for this year’s Star City Nights, a local music and arts festival that is essentially a big creative block party under the stars. It is a night full of artists, interactive activities, live music, community vibes and just the best energy my wonderful downtown consistently delivers. Being asked to design for it was both surreal, exciting, and frightening… I mean, I got to be the one to shape how it looks??

Wild.

For anyone not local, Star City Nights is a night-time festival in Lafayette, Indiana that supports the arts and brings the community together. People set up booths to sell their work, there’s awesome live music, all sorts of interactive art stuff happening… it’s very “let’s celebrate everything cool about this community” in the best way possible! This year marked a completely new era for the event under new hosts, the Downtown Lafayette Business Owners Association, which called for a rebrand. Enter: me 👋

I was hired to create the visual identity for this year’s event. To break that down, it meant I was creating: the new logo, full brand guidelines (color palette, typography, how to best use their visual assets moving forward), and a custom illustration to be used on posters, merch, etc etc.

And I was asked to do it in a way that both connected to the old while creating something fresh for the new. It needed to capture the energy of the event, the diversity in our community, and the warmth in our gatherings. The final illustration is a clean line drawing with pops of color that playfully represents people interacting and enjoying the event. Wth music notes lazily drifting through the crowd amongst a smattering of stars…

Getting chosen for this gig was equal parts “OH MY GOD, I’M GOING TO PASS OUT AND PUKE IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER” and “wait… are we sure??”

I was picked out of a pool of other incredibly talented designers, and I absolutely felt the pressure to do the event justice.

Right now, the logo and illustration have been posted on social media, but the real test will be when the event happens in September. That’s when I will get to see the artwork out in the real world… on shirts, totes, and whatever else it ends up on…

You know I’ll be back here with Part 2 to show it all off and probably overshare about how emotional I got seeing it in person.

Thanks for reading, and thank you to everyone who’s been cheering me on. This project is definitely one for the “wow, I actually did that” folder.

UN-real. But super grateful.

Thanks for being here,
Jai 🙂