Carterton Daffodil Festival
Carterton Daffodil Festival is Carterton’s free, family friendly street festival. It’s a festival of colour, music, dane, food, craft, daffodils and steam trains.
It’s a celebration of the beginning of spring and our community and culture, where our streets are transformed into a vibrant celebration. It’s one of Carterton’s biggest days with community groups and businesses coming together to showcase their diverse and vibrant community. It’s truly a place where community and celebration blossom.
Historically Carterton Daffodil Festival was known for its daffodils and the steam train, but the festival was grown into so much more. Carterton District Council decided it was time to rebrand to better reflect the festival. We started by adding Wairarapa Spring
Day Out as a tagline to promote the fact that this is the premier festival of spring in the Wairarapa and speak to the fact that it is a day of celebrations through the words Day Out which are also generic enough to cover the variety of different activities on offer.
The logo showcases a CDF monogram in stylised, abstract letters with a simple geometric flower that immediately expresses spring time and the plants blossoming. The simple C and D shapes cleverly reflect each other while the F has been crafted to represent the trumpet of a daffodil. We used different colours in each of the shapes to really express fun and joy of the festival, community diversity and spring time. We created various logo formats to give the brand flexibility and express creativity.
Key to the brand is the stylised, colourful, fun illustration that we create to showcases a range of things from Carterton and the festival to really help promote that the festival is so much more than just daffodils and the steam train. The fun style feels appropriate and appealing for all ages. We used a grid of squares to bring all the illustrations together. We started with depicting the journey with the Rimutaka tunnel and Tararua ranges at the top left. The simple white line represents the train track or journey as you arrive onto this side of the hill and travel to Carterton, with the white line tintersecting the illustration until we reach the steam train down in the bottom left corner. The illustration showcases things from the festival as well as the region. We have a hand picking daffodils, food, drinks, music entertainment, a ride and market stalls to speak to the day and then things like a tractor, spring flowers, lambs, rooster, trees, river, fields, east coast hills and spring sunshine to speak to the rural farming community. The clever grid of the illustration means sections of the illustration can bee used separately to speak to different aspects of the offering.
Overall the branding really expresses a festival bursting with colour and life. According to the client the feedback for the design has been overwhelmingly positive with no one ever talking to her about the design and now people are actually searching her out to say how great it looks.
We developed branding design, illustration, promotional posters, billboards, advertising both print and digital, social media, t-shirts, hats and photo frame.