Woodstock ‘24 Brand Design
Turn it up! (No, literally. Turn up the sound on the video above, the logo syncs to the music!)
August 12, 2024 was the 30th anniversary of the festival that defined the attitude of the 90’s: Woodstock ‘94. Originally designed to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the legendary Woodstock, it quickly devolved into one of the most chaotic festivals in history. Only 164,000 tickets were sold, but over 350,000 people showed up. I hate to quote Wikipedia, but I think they put it best when they wrote, “event policies were logistically unenforceable.” This led to countless safety violations and horrendous viewing conditions, yet the sheer energy and excitement on the grounds fueled one of the most memorable concert experiences to date.
In spite of its infamous history, surviving video tells a different story, one of peace and love that calls back to the original Woodstock. I love watching not only the replays of Woodstock ‘94 sets, but also the clips of people letting go of their hang ups and living in the moment. Since 2024 marks 30 years since the event I hold such reverence for, I thought it would be fun to imagine how Woodstock ‘24 branding might look. I created a brand kit for the event, along with a kinetic logo that references logos from bands who played, and synchronizes with music for a wide range of audio-visualizations.
Project Details:
Skills: Brand Design, Type Design, Motion Graphics
Tools: Illustrator, After Effects, Photoshop
Date: Spring 2024
Problem Significance
Over the past several decades, the Woodstock name has become synonymous to hippie culture. While this is true in some sense, it disregards the bigger picture behind the event.
When most people hear the word “Woodstock,” they think of hippies, tie-dye, and stoners packed together in a haze of jam bands. That shorthand grew out of Woodstock ’69, which unfolded against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and Cold War anxiety. The festival was a deliberate counterpoint to the violence of its time, marketed as “3 Days of Peace and Music.” And while the communal camping and counterculture image still dominate public memory, its true legacy lies in the music itself: Hendrix’s feedback-laden “Star-Spangled Banner,” Santana’s searing “Soul Sacrifice,” and Joan Baez performing through storm and fatigue. These moments made Woodstock not just a cultural gathering but a defining stage for some of the most important artists of the era.
The issue is that the flowery, hippie aesthetics of Woodstock are remembered more than the performances, and this has had an impact on the perception on its future events. People’s memories of Woodstock are synonymous with flower-painted VW campers, however, later iterations of Woodstock captured entirely different cultural energies. Woodstock ’94, my personal favorite, had little to do with flower power and everything to do with the raw, rebellious sound of the 90s. Torrential rain turned the fields into oceans of mud, yet instead of dampening spirits it fueled unforgettable performances. Green Day’s set dissolved into a mud-slinging riot between band and crowd, and Nine Inch Nails turned their industrial sound into theater by going onstage covered head to toe in sludge. These chaotic, messy, even violent moments stood in stark contrast to the peace-and-love narrative of ’69, yet they embodied the same core Woodstock spirit: music uniting people through spontaneity and rebellion.
That gap between perception and reality is what motivated this project. The public memory still equates Woodstock with hippie nostalgia, while Woodstock ’94 sits overlooked as a footnote. I wanted to challenge that stereotype by reframing the 25th anniversary as a cultural milestone in its own right, one that defined the sound and energy of the 90s just as surely as the original defined the 60s. My branding for Woodstock ’24 reclaims that history. Through a brand kit and kinetic logo inspired by the visual language of bands of the era, I set out to show how the Woodstock spirit has always been bigger than clichés, it has lived on through the music itself.
Creating the Identity
The visual identity of the zine is built around a continuous pattern based on traditional Laotian weaving techniques.
In the first exploration I focused on maximizing the “fun” and human side of Woodstock. I looked at fonts that used human posing to form letterforms, which led me to create a typeface built from hand and foot shapes and overlap it with archival Woodstock footage. At the time I was experimenting heavily with blending filters and how they could be implemented across the Adobe suite, and that pushed the overlapping video effect. I also shifted the footage through gradients to nod to the colorful, flowery associations people still have with the original festivalI ended up combining this idea with the reactive type concept so the final direction shifts between band fonts in time with the music. I liked how this brought together the rhythmic energy from the second exploration with the eclectic typography from the third. The result feels alive and constantly evolving, just like the festival itself. Each shift between fonts mirrors the diversity and unpredictability that made Woodstock ‘94 so special. It’s chaotic, colorful, and a little rough around the edges, but that’s exactly what gives it its charm. It captures the spontaneous, collective energy that defined the event.
Of course, a kinetic logo doesn’t work in all contexts, specifically when printed physically, so I needed to develop some static versions as well. To try and keep some of the “flowing” aesthetics of the kinetic logo, I sorted the random type for the static version by percieved weight, and extended this into the lockup with the “the thirtieth anniversary.” The same cannot be said for the smaller version of the logo, where I found it best to use the fonts which synergized best with one another.