The Drop Festival is a national touring music festival. It follows the Australian leg of the World Surf League’s major surfing events around Australia.
Problem: Refreshing the festival’s artwork. Maintaining continuity with previous artwork. Developing a new content-managed website that can handle event season traffic spikes.
Solution: Ocean-sunset colour palette. Symmetric, line-bordered vector artwork. Heavily themed website interface. Silverstripe CMS, AWS and Cloudflare combo.
The seasonal artwork uses a vibrant, warm colour palette, referencing ocean sunsets, with some halftone accessory patterns. Orange is reserved in the website interface for primary actions like “Sign-up” or “Buy Tickets”.
Geometrical shapes in the artwork reference the sunset and ocean: distant clouds using waveform shapes that draw the eye to the centre of the layout; ripple waveforms that create vertical divisions; a setting sun using the primary orange; and algae with halftone dot patterns.
A kit of these line-bordered shapes and colour divisions was created for use throughout the website, print and digital collateral. The website interface is heavily themed, using the vector artwork and line borders, without confusing the user.
The website is powered by Silverstripe CMS. The CMS build is highly flexible, with re-usable “elemental blocks” to build custom page layouts suited to a variety of content types. For media-driven traffic spikes, an AWS and Cloudflare combination was used, handling surges with minimal costs.