(Fyre Festival, Dystopian Icon Design, IE HST, 2019)
The task was to create an icon set for a specific music festival, we chose the now infamous Fyre Festival - an interesting case study, given its popularity and recency in the media through the release of two documentaries providing an inside glimpse into the most expensive luxurious music festival that never happened.
Despite the festival’s presentation as a luxurious experience, it is present in the collective imagination as a failure, and we wanted to allude to this duality through the design. We decided to have each icon display a “broken” or disappointing element to festival attendees, such as a flat tyre on a bus. We also decided that since the festival was one whichhad taken place in the past (and would likely never be repeated) we wanted the icons to look like photographs taken from the festival itself, not disembodied icons with a flat background.
In the process of our investigation, we found that the majority of Fyre Festival graphics included the characteristic orange that was the central element of their logo. We opted for a similar approach, creating a complementary color palette based around hues of the lively orange and blue, conveying the beach festival aesthetic. The Fyre Festival orange was featured in the totality of the icons.
