Advertising campaign design and decoration for Red Bull Music Festival Moscow 2019

On the last summer weekend of 2019, Moscow hosted the Red Bull Music Festival for the second time. The three-day festival was held in an unusual format: no headliners, only “complex concepts and new ideas” - and at once at five venues in different parts of the city. For each of them, it was necessary to come up with a visual content that was in tune with the innovative ideas of the organizers. There was a lot of work ahead, so we started preparing for the summer festival in February.

The number one task is to decide on the general style and draw a key visual, the key image of the event, which will form the basis of all subsequent decisions. The Red Bull Music Festival takes place in many cities around the world, and, of course, Red Bull has a guidebook with ready-made templates. But we decided that the Moscow festival would have its own style, and took only the required elements from the proposed: logo, corporate colors and font.

The starting point for us was the detail of the logo, which is played up in one way or another in the design of the festival around the world, namely, the contour drawing of the city, which in English is called the skyline, looks like a sound track.

We did not want the Kremlin towers and Stalinist skyscrapers to be the main symbols of Moscow again, so we took the Crimean Bridge into work, especially since the nearby Chaika pool and the Strelka Institute participated in the festival. The program also included walks along the Moscow River.

So: the outlines of the bridge, the perspective of the river and the energy of the music formed the central image of the Red Bull Music Festival 2019. The music at the festival is predominantly electronic — hence the details of the analog synthesizers, from which it all started. We will use the same graphic principles for the key visual of each of the sites, but for now we are making digital based on them (covers for playlists in Apple Music, pictures for the official website, animation for promo on Instagram) and outdoor advertising with a line-up and a schedule on every day of the festival.

Festival concepts

Diving Into Sounds

Seagull

Probably the most interesting of the venues of the Red Bull Music Festival in 2019 was the Chaika outdoor pool, where the first underwater concert in Russia was held with the participation of the British project Wet Sounds. Its essence is that some of the speakers are installed under water, in which, as you know, sound does not propagate at all like it does through air. And the audience is provided with complete immersion in the rhythm — in the truest sense of the word.

Already familiar tricks in the main picture: a distant perspective and a recognizable contour of an indoor tennis court with a wave-shaped roof. We use key visual elements to design the pool — flags, streamers, navigation, and a backdrop for the scene that fits under the jump tower.

Grand Opening / Closing Party

Strelka

The opening party and the final concert of the festival were held on the territory of the Strelka Institute. We drew illustrations for the site and helped to arrange in a single style — simple shapes and bright colors — the entrance, the bar counter, the stand for selling official products of the Red Bull Music Festival. We also made merch, but that’s a slightly different story.

The posters for Strelka were created by the institute’s team. Design — Anna Kulachok.

Rhythm Evolution / Disco Deformation

Mutabor

Two parties at once, one about the evolution of techno, the other about the metamorphoses of disco, were held on the last night of summer at the Mutabor club. In visual accompaniment, we maintain the given axial theme and mix local architecture into the perspective with music — the facade of the factory where the nightclub is located.

We ruthlessly eliminate all bright colors from the color palette, except for red. Still techno. Only red, black and white — and in the design of the box office and press accreditation stand. We roll the lineup and schedule onto plexiglass and hang it from the ceiling at different levels.

SBP4 WHAT? 24H Concert

Richter

The SBPC group gave a 24-hour concert in the mansion on Pyatnitskaya, which is occupied by the Richter hotel and cultural space. The interiors of the building are good and without outside interference, but minimal navigation was needed, if only because the entrance is in the courtyard. The poster for the concert is a little out of the general style, but it perfectly conveys the essence of what is happening: musical madness under the roof of an eight-room hotel.

It must be said here that the approval of each layout in this project is a long process, because it had to be coordinated first with the Moscow office of Red Bull, then with each of the sites and, finally, with the global brand. And in the case of Richter, we also took into account the wishes of the musicians.

Coast 2 Coast

Boat

River cruises for the Red Bull Music Festival Moscow 2019 were organized by the St. Petersburg musical formation Roots United, so two capitals met on key visual, between which a pleasure boat sails.

For a real motor ship that sailed along the Moscow River, we made an external design (a sign for the festival, a pattern and branding on the sides), posters and a registration desk. And they also drew a design for bar chips — they were not paper, but made of thick plastic, like chips for a casino. At all venues of the festival, drinks were poured into glasses with an identity invented by us.