Project
Role
Senior designer
Sector
Arts
Category
Campaign
Sydney Fringe Festival
The Sydney Fringe Festival is the city’s premier platform for independent and home-grown talent, yet it is often perceived as being limited to experimental or avant-garde work. The 2024 campaign aimed to broaden this perception, showcasing the festival’s full range, from playful and unconventional performances to award-winning touring productions, while increasing awareness, engagement, and recognition across key festival hubs.
An explosion of unexpected
The Approach
The campaign was designed to reframe Sydney Fringe as an open, accessible, and culturally diverse festival, balancing curiosity with clarity to reflect its energetic and inclusive spirit through:
Developing a campaign concept that blends humour, accessibility, and clarity to shift perception and invite broader audience engagement
Introducing witty, audience-led sublines drawn from real festival-goer sentiment, paired with signature visual cues to strengthen instant recognition and recall
Creating an iconography-led system to clarify festival structure and improve wayfinding across diverse program offerings, while strengthening long-term brand consistency
Developing scalable design toolkits, including social templates and guidelines, to support cohesive rollout across internal and external touchpoints
The existing framework lacked structure, resulting in audience confusion. I led the audit and development of the new festival architecture, defining a visual identification system and logical structure that allows for category growth.
My Role
I contributed to the development of the campaign concept and activation direction, helping shape the overall narrative approach and system thinking. I led the restructuring of the festival’s visual and communication architecture, and developed comprehensive design toolkits – including social media templates and brand guidelines – to support the internal design team and ensure consistent, scalable execution across all touchpoints.
Example of guerrilla marketing concepts that were proposed during the project to infiltrate public spaces in a surprising, humorous way.
Details
Project
Impact
Broadened audience perception of Sydney Fringe beyond experimental work to a more diverse and accessible festival offering with stronger ticket sale results from the previous year
Strengthened brand recognition through a more cohesive and instantly identifiable visual system across all touchpoints
Improved navigation and engagement with the festival architecture through a clearer visual language system supporting future growth
Enabled consistent rollout across channels by equipping internal teams with scalable templates and guidelines
Studio
SomeOne Sydney
Creative Team
Creative Direction — Tom Dabner
Client Services — Rebecca Bosustow
Design — Tom Dabner, Michelle Jin, Julien Bertouille
Motion — Tom Dabner