Northside Jazz Festival · Print · sample engagement
A poster system, not a poster
Legible at 22m · sponsor sign-off 4 rounds → 1 · 80% reusable
The brief
The Northside Jazz Festival is twelve years old, and every year a different volunteer designs the poster from scratch — no continuity, improvised sponsor lockups, and a name you couldn’t read from the curb.
The brief: a poster system, not a poster — fixed zones, a two-color risograph community run, a contract-fixed sponsor zone, and swappable headliner art.
Success meant a passed street-legibility test, happier sponsors, and assets that survive to next year.
Constraints: Works at A3 / A1 / digital · two-color risograph for the community run · sponsor zone fixed by contract · new headliner art swaps yearly.
How it was made
-
Discovery
Twelve years produced twelve unrelated posters: no continuity, sponsor lockups improvised into contract breaches, and a headliner name illegible at fifteen meters. The fix was never a better poster — it was a system any volunteer could run next year.
Poster archive audit + legibility test. -
Strategy
Design a system, not a poster: fixed zones for the mark and year, swappable headliner art, dates, and a contract-fixed sponsor zone. Type set huge for fifteen-meter legibility, two-color riso for the community run, one template across sizes. Gate ① signed.
Template zones + system rules. -
Concept
Three template directions: a big type stack, a photo hero, a pattern field. The photo hero needed a great new image every year — the exact failure mode; the pattern drowned the contractual sponsor logos. The type stack reads at fifteen meters and never needs photography. It won.
Three directions — rejections preserved. -
Design
A type scale tuned for distance reading, the two-color riso palette plus a full-color digital variant, a locked sponsor grid, and headliner-and-year swap slots. One template, three outputs — A3, A1, and a digital banner.
Type scale, colorways, size set. -
Production
Two-color riso separations — a blue plate and a red plate that overprint to the finished poster — A3, A1, and digital-banner outputs, a sponsor-zone dieline, and an editable template so next year’s volunteer swaps only the headliner art.
Riso separations + template handoff. -
Results — how we measured
Tested on the street and against the template inventory: legible at twenty-two meters past the fifteen-meter target, sponsor sign-off in one round instead of four, and eighty percent of assets reusable next year. Demonstrative; cards below.
Results instrument (demonstrative).
The deliverable, live
This is the working deliverable itself — not a mockup of it.
Open full screen ↗Results demonstrative data
- 22mlegibility (target: 15m)
- 1sponsor sign-off round (from 4)
- 80%assets reusable next year
- 2-colorriso, community-press ready
“For the first time the poster looked like last year’s and next year’s. Our sponsors signed off in one email, and the volunteer just swaps the headliner now.”
Organizer persona, Northside Jazz Festival — demonstration quote
In the world
Where the system lives once it ships — shelf, hands, and street. photography in production
