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Burning Man: Waking Dreams Advertising Campaign

This project aims to propose a series of graphics in order to create an advertising campaign for the Burning Man this year’s edition. Burning Man is known as a community that, in addition to encouraging free expression through art, also promotes values such as radical inclusion and environmental respect. For this reason, it has been decided to take advantage of all these concepts and generate a graphic proposal that goes hand in hand with the spirit and the ambience of the so-called festival. 

Burning Man is truly an indescribable place, an escape from the real world where everyone has the chance to be whoever and do whatever they want. It is not a usual event, but rather a community, a vibrant participatory metropolis generated by its citizens (Burning Man, n.d.) where all worries are forgotten and practising the arts of radical self-expression and self-reliance are possible (Dasbach, 2016). It is said that Burning Man is unlike anything one can ever experience in their life, as the project created by us has also been a new experience and an unexplored world in terms of design.

Every year, the Burning Man community creates and destroys a temporary city in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (Shamsian, 2017), that is to say, a seven-day gathering in the desert of more than 70,000 people that includes spontaneous musical performances, art installations and lots of partying (Warren, 2019). However, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica (2019), its story begins in 1986 on a small beach in San Francisco where two members of the San Francisco arts community burned a two-metre-tall wooden effigy of a man in celebration of the summer solstice — a fact that later determined the name of the today’s so-called festival.

Burning Man Waking Dreams Advertising Campaign - All Graphics

Burning Man Advertising Campaign

Burning Man Waking Dreams Advertising Campaign - Entry Tickets Design

We have interpreted this year’s theme ‘Waking Dreams’ as an allusion to the artistic movement called Surrealism. In this sense, all the graphic elements, from shapes to typography, are inspired by it. That is the reason why also the entry tickets design presents an illustrated reinterpretation of one of the artworks realized by the surrealist artist Jose Roosevelt, which is ‘The Invisible Coat’, made in 1958.

Burning Man Waking Dreams Advertising Campaign - Flyers Design

Posters Design

Burning Man Waking Dreams Advertising Campaign - Infographic Posters Design

The aesthetic that we have approached for all graphics (entry tickets, flyers, posters, webpage, etc.) is inspired by the atmosphere that Burning Man acquires with night-time lighting. For this reason, the colour palette embraces a series of fun, vibrant and saturated colours that visually impact instantly, accompanied by a dark background. The entire project turns out to be an aesthetically appealing advertising campaign in line with the artistic diversity and the free self-expression demonstrated and encouraged by the festival.

Web Design (Restyling)

Landing Page Design

In terms of navigation within the Burning Man website, many flaws have been found, as the amount of information is very extensive but also quite chaotically structured. In this sense, it has been tried to make the information a little more accessible, providing a much more attractive aesthetic according to the festival and a more stimulating design. Even so, due to the impressive number of pages on the website, only a few of them have been prototyped, being rather a sample of how the whole website could be carried out.

This proposal’s creators, besides me, are Ángela Gónzalez and María Bazo (from A Full Piñon Studio) and Carlota Tamayo.

Burning Man. (n.d.). The Event. Retrieved from www.burningman.org/event

Dasbach, S. (2016). These ‘Faces Of Burning Man’ Have A Lot Of Wise Words To Share With You. Retrieved from www.elitedaily.com/envision/burning-man-faces-quotes/1601888

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2019). Burning Man. Retrieved from www.britannica.com/art/Burning-Man

Roosevelt, J. (1958). The Invisible Coat. Retrieved from www.behance.net/gallery/69550815/The-Invisible-Coat

Shamsian, J. (2017). There’s a smart reason why the Burning Man festival is laid out like a giant clock. Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com/why-burning-man-festival-black-rock-city-circle-2017-8

Warren, K. (2019). Everything you’ve been wanting to know about Burning Man, the wild 9-day arts event in the Nevada desert frequented by celebs and tech moguls. Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com/what-is-burning-man-theme-tickets-dates-outfits-2018-8