Clifden Arts Festival.
Clifden Arts Festival, Ireland’s oldest arts festival, is where I had the pleasure of working with their team for over 17 years. I was responsible for designing its entire brand identity, annual poster, and festival programme, including all of its online presence; website design, email design, social content design, as well as online ticket sales UX, and providing support to box office staff who were courageously managing over 100 events during a 12-day period!
During my 17 years with the festival, I was lucky to get to work with some great visual artists, performers, illustrators, and writers (one or two divas!) who all contributed to the success of the festival, under the careful and mindful curation of its founder and director, Brendan Flynn.
My work with the festival consisted of creating their brand identity, annual festival poster with artist collaboration, designing the festival programme—online and in print, marketing collateral creation, newspaper advertisement design, launch invitation design, postcard design, newsletter, and email database management, website management, online ticketing system UX and box office support.
At the heart of any festival is its programme. Each year I worked alongside the festival director to establish the creative approach for the upcoming festival. When establishing the visual presence of the festival, we always tried to consider all elements that made up the festival; the community coming together to celebrate the arts, local as well as visiting international artists and performers, and our thoughts on the current year’s lineup, to arrive at an encapsulating theme for my design approach.
Once we had established the theme and creative direction, we would then move into the production phase, liaising with illustrators, artists, printers, festival committee members, and volunteers to get everyone moving in the same direction and communicate our goals. We would carry the visual theme across all the mediums which bore fruit in the manifestation of the festival poster, programme, website, and all the other collateral. I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with many acclaimed artists and illustrators such as Joe Boske, Jimmy Lawlor, Hetty Lawlor, and Mark Joyce.
I thoroughly enjoyed the evolving process of working on a festival of this size, being local myself, I took pride in the thought, that not only was I participating in an exciting and meaningful community project, but together as a team, we were contributing to the overall well-being of our community by bringing the wealth and richness of the arts to our rural setting.
None of this would have been possible if it were not for the vision of the festival’s director and founding father Brendan Flynn, who has worked tirelessly for more than four decades in order to keep the arts close to the heart and center of life in Clifden each September. I wish them continued sucess.
