London’s biggest arts festival hosts over 500 events each year.
We’ve worked with the directors for three successive festivals to deliver compelling branding, visual identity and digital marketing infrastructure to allow the festival to thrive.
The Client
VAULT festival is seen by the UK arts sector as the key test-bed for their work before they take it to the world’s largest arts festival in Edinburgh. VAULT gives them a young, engaged audience in South London who are eager to see experimental, dynamic and creative new work. This ethos has now led VAULT to deliver over 2000 performances from 4000 artists, in over 500 different productions – in seventeen venues!
The Identity
Combining flat texture shape elements with dual-light photographic treatments, the website and identity were well-received across the arts in London and moved VAULT into new identity-led campaigns to mirror much larger festivals such as the Edinburgh fringe. This helped increase VAULT’s sales on previous years, allowing them to more than double their event scale for 2019. The platform also embedded the Spektrix ticket sales plugin, and made use of various analytics integrations to aid the digital marketing campaigns.
The Visuals
VAULT had commissioned various brand identities from freelance designers for several years but were keen to establish a higher standard of visual cohesion to help them grow the festival further. We were briefed to create a youthful brand identity to capture a mid-ground between a standard arts festival and a London clubnight, appealing to an 18-30 audience who were already engaged with nearby brands and venues along the South Bank.
The Website
The site and ticket sales application was built to handle a heavy load as the season launch for a new festival is accompanied by a range of press and PR, meaning that tens of thousands of users access the site on the first day of a new festival’s season announcement. All in all, 79,000 tickets were booked for 2019 and analytics have shown that 70% of these purchases were via mobile. This meant it was important that the site was designed mobile-first, with branding and visual identity devices attached to skin the site with low impact, meaning the identity can be refreshed year-on-year for minimum investment. The Spektrix box-office system was also designed and developed to integrate with Eventotron, which allows the festival to handle data entry for its 500+ events via user-managed uploads.