“Jenseits von Millionen” (engl. “Beyond Millions”) is a small benefit festival in Brandenburg, Germany, featuring indie and punk musicians. Run entirely on a volunteer basis, the festival has a friendly, family atmosphere that embraces the whole village community. The location adds to the charm, as the festival grounds include a medieval castle and church. Each year the festival features a new illustrated design with a different theme and style. The year of fire is a design proposal based on the example of the year 2025 while using a fictitious line-up, and refers to the fiery excitement before and during the festival, combining fire and festival accessories in a humorous way to create new moments.

As the festival is handmade, friendly and accessible, I designed a hand-lettered logo that reflects these values, is recognisable and adds a personal touch. In order to establish the logo over several years, I designed a basic black version that could be adapted to each year’s illustration style – like the fire in this example. In this way, new illustrators in subsequent years could play with the logo in a way that would not undermine the festival’s recognisability.

Various illustrated festival items – from instruments to more pragmatic sanitation items – can be integrated into multiple use cases such as social media, wayfinding, merchandise or as part of the decoration on the festival site itself.

The two colour versions of the festival wristbands allow the security team to see at a glance whether someone is a festival guest or allowed backstage, even without a lot of light. Although the colours are different, the wristband designs are exactly the same, so it wouldn’t be too complicated or expensive to produce the two different versions.

On the festival grounds the turtle is the symbol for the awareness team and the code word for getting help. As this is something that needs to be recognised instantly and annually, I treated the turtle like the logo rather than other festival items of this particular design for just one year. A basic black version could be reused each year and, just like the logo, manipulated in small ways to fit each year’s special design.

Round sticker mockups by GraphBerry
Tattoo Mockup by freepik

Special thanks to Jenseits von Millionen for all the insights