Utah Arts Festival 2009 - 2015

Utah Arts Festival New Identity

The Bombshells conducted surveys, met with marketing consortia, compared budget numbers and created a plan to refresh the Utah Arts Festival’s look and communication efforts. The goal was to embrace what has made the Festival the most popular and celebrated outdoor event in the state for the last 35 years—the diversity of art in every imaginable form from traditional to ground-breaking.

The new look was unveiled as the festival marked its 35th anniversary as Utah’s largest single cultural gathering in one location. The new look embodied the organization’s spirit to bring art, the cornerstone of creative democracy, to the streets for the public to enjoy.

Designed by Kevin Perry, festival graphic designer and president of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the new logo has brought a consistent look to the Festival’s identity. The look has not only strengthened the connections the festival makes with its guests each year, it also has been flexible enough to promote artists and their work. It celebrates the expanding new ways individuals express themselves creatively.

The Bombshells created a launch event featuring the work of 30 artists that garnered attention from virtually every news outlet (traditional print and broadcast as well as social and digital media) in Salt Lake City. The launch event was the first stage of a campaign ramping up to the 4-day festival June 23-26, 2011, which served as a template for subsequent years.

Ongoing Festival Promotion, Communications and Marketing Efforts

Since 2011, the festival broadened its diversity and expanded its reach to bring in both familiar and new artists, as well as food vendors, to the state’s biggest cultural event and highly anticipated as the first major cultural event of the summer season. Before 2011, the festival attendance had reached a plateau at around 78,000 guests over four days. After the campaign had been implemented in 2011, the festival registered a new record attendance with more than 82,000 visitors – a benchmark that has been met and exceeded since then.

The Bombshells compiled and edited a magazine-quality festival program, secured comprehensive media buys for the festival, developed promotional programs with sponsors and media partners, implemented a robust multimedia content and social media plan and pitched many feature stories to print and electronic media.

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