The festival as a visual communication project

A festival spread across an entire city is not a single stage with a single billboard. It is a city that changes its rhythm for a month, and visual communication has to let anyone, resident or visitor, understand in three seconds that there is an event and where to find it.

LongLake is this at maximum scale. Events that start at ten in the morning in a library and end at midnight in Parco Ciani. International headliners in Piazza Riforma at night and free concerts at Boschetto Ciani in the afternoon. Children’s shows in a cloister and independent productions in the LAC foyer.

The signage brief for a festival like this has three parts.

Announce. Big, immediate, readable from far away, before the festival even opens. The maxi banner on the lakefront is not “a sign”, it is the cover of the festival for an entire month.
Orient. Someone arriving in Lugano from Bellinzona, Milan or Zurich does not know the piazza names. The programme totem in front of the station, the directional arrows on Via Nassa, the stage map at Parco Ciani are the real manual of the festival.
Coordinate. Thirty different pieces of print still have to say, together, that they all belong to the same festival. Fonts, colours, graphic anchoring: the discipline is decided once, in a single brief, and holds for the whole month.

For LongLake and similar festivals we produce five families of print between late June and early July.
Maxi announcement banners: lakefront banners 3×1.5 or 4×2 m, UV print on PVC-free 440 g/sqm tarpaulin, stainless eyelets, fixing with steel cables and turnbuckles, mounted for a month between sun and thunderstorms.
Programme boards A1 or A0 in snap frames, distributed across 15-30 strategic points, UV print on weatherproof laminated paper, updated 2-3 times.
Wayfinding: arrows, stage numbers, service signs 30×40 or 40×60 cm, aluminium composite 3 mm, white lacquered, fixing on posts or existing structures.
Stage backdrops: tarps with logo and sponsors, 4×3 or 6×4 m, UV print on PVC-free flame-retardant B1 tarpaulin, eyelets and steel cable tensioning.
Sponsor panels: A2 or A1 signs on forex or aluminium composite, placed at the info desk, stage and speakers’ table, yearly layout change, reusable support.

The time constraint: 3 weeks between brief and opening.

A city festival with international headliners usually locks its cast and sponsorship 3-4 weeks before opening. That means: from the final graphic brief to the first installation, at most 20-25 working days, and in between there are weekends, holidays and multiple approvals from the festival committee and the sponsors.

To meet these deadlines, print production for city festivals follows three working rules.

First.

Graphic brief locked in writing once. Every subsequent change is noted and counted separately. It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of time: two revision rounds on a maxi banner push installation back by three days.

Second.

Quote broken down by family of print. Maxi banners, programme boards, wayfinding, backdrops, sponsor panels are five separate quotes, not one. That way each is approved by the right person on the festival committee, and no input holds up the others.

Third.

Staggered installation. First week: maxi announcement banners. Second week: programme boards in the strategic points. Last two days: stage wayfinding and backdrops, which stay outside only during the event week.

LongLake as a case: a communication that speaks for a whole month

The maxi banner that the Lugano public sees along the lakefront at the start of July is not just an announcement. It is the opening of a visual communication campaign that runs to the end of the month, covers thirty different points across the city, and shifts slightly each day to reflect that evening’s programme. Behind it there is a print pipeline that starts from a graphic brief approved in early June and delivers the first installation in the first week of July.

It is the same pipeline that serves anyone in Ticino organising a distributed festival, a multi-venue corporate event, an election campaign, a museum opening. Anyone organising something that lives in the city for more than two weeks, not only inside a hotel ballroom, has the same visual communication problem as LongLake, and needs the same print pipeline.