project background

In 2019, Patreon made its first appearance at SXSW. We took over a house on Rainey Street in Austin, and established it as our “House of Creativity.”

For three days, we hosted musical performances, live podcasts, and panels with with some amazing guests. In addition to these live performances, we also invited the festival-goers into our space to learn about the world of Patreon.

FRAMING the challenge

My job was to turn our space into an immersive branded experience that would help people understand our mission of getting creators paid for their work.

As the only designer on this project, I knew it would be a difficult undertaking. From start to finish, I had to navigate a litany of other challenges—limited brand recognition, a tiny budget, and programming that was constantly changing to name just a few.

 

ROLE

  • Branding, Environmental design, Art direction, Production design

NOTES

  • Produced at Patreon

  • Copywriting by Taryn Arnold

Promotion

SXSW is famous for its constant stream of live programming. Musicians, comedians, podcasters, and business leaders all converge on the festival to share their art and perspectives with attendees. A big part of our presence was hosting performances at our space. Promotion was key to getting people to stop and step through our door. We created digital and physical posters to plaster on social platforms and around our space.

It was a lot of fun to watch people get excited as they checked out our posters and realized that one of their favorite performers would be playing a tiny intimate venue like ours.

TAKING OVER THE SPACE

In a space as crowded as Rainey Street, you have to shout to be heard, so our visuals followed suit. Previously, Patreon had mostly only hosted its own events with users who were already on board with our vision. This would be the first time that we’d ever introduced ourselves to an audience that had no idea what we were up to.

Branding an entire space was a lot of fun. At the time, Patreon’s brand stakeholders were really interested in exploring a grittier expression of the brand. Rough, natural textures and bold colors were the hallmarks of our identity and were intended to communicate the raw, creative energy that fueled the creators on the Patreon platform.

It was intimidating setting up shop next to household names like Snapchat, and Amazon, but the response we got was incredible.

Outdoors

We designed our space to filter people into our outdoor venue first. As you walked in, our manifesto set the terms of our vision—”Create on your own terms”. We wanted to leave no doubt who we served. Our stage hosted dozens of performances from podcasters, social justice activists, musicians, comedians, and more.

On the deck, a creator-centric Mad Libs wall allowed attendees to express their creative outlook using wooden tile letters.

Indoors

Inside our venue, we took every opportunity to connect attendees with our vision of a world that took creators seriously, and advocated for them.

I created an kiosk that profiled six creators on the Patreon platform. Each profile featured video and photo content that allowed the creators to talk about why Patreon mattered to them and their creative practice. Working with a fabricator, I created podiums and custom cases for the iPads that ran the interactive program. We used simple materials to keep up with our rough design language—that also helped us stay on budget!

Rather than having guests sign a guestbook, we loaded up on Polaroid film, and created prompts that asked our guests to share their artistic points of view. People had a blast taking photos and sharing them on our wall. Some people even used it as an old-school networking opportunity to seek out like-minded collaborators.

MANIFESTO EXCERPT

Our manifesto was written (by Taryn Arnold) to leave no doubt about what Patreon strives to offer the world.