La Bâtie Visual Assets

Experimental interactions for the Swiss cabaret festival, La Bâtie

Challenge

To create a graphic and visual language for La Bâtie Festival de Genève by taking inspiration from renowned designers.

My Roles
‍
Content Strategy
Visual Design
Interaction Design
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Team
‍
Avril, Linda, Thomas, Zaac

Timeframe
‍
4 weeks, Spring 2022

Deliverables
‍
Final Slide Deck

Final website redesign (no sound)

Background

My role

I played a project management role by planning, organizing, and directing what needed to be completed each week, while ensuring the projects was on time and within scope. I articulated the project ideas, work and progress into weekly presentations that were meaningful and impactful. For the project deliverables, I focused on content strategy and copywriting, but I also had a visual design role as well.

About La Bâtie

La Bâtie is an annual, 17-day, late summer performance art festival located in Geneva, Switzerland where artists abroad perform music, theatre and contemporary dance. This project is focused on the nightlife cabaret program of the festival, Le Poudrier, featuring shows with themes from the drag arts.

Designer precedents

The project started by studying the work of two designers: Wim Crouwel and Dan Friedman. The purpose of studying these designers was to extract specific design principles to further develop experimental graphic design skills.

Process that started wide and ended with two well-defined principles

Graphic exploration

Here the goal was to develop 3-4 sets of multiple, unified graphic assets based off the designer principles that we identified. Some different assets that were explored were: posters, a window display, a hallway entrance and a wall mural.

Some of the graphic assets that were carried on throughout the rest of the project

Visual exploration

The team began exploring how a microsite could be created a different levels of expressiveness. I was most involved in the creation of the first two sites, specifically in the areas of visual design (color, type) and content design.

THE FOCUS: To create pre-event excitement for La Bâtie's cabaret events. 

Functional and expressive

The dynamic personalities of the performers play an integral role to build the atmosphere of the cabaret shows. By surfacing performer-related content (names, headshots, recordings) and using loud, fast-moving interactions, this direction brings forward the dynamic personalities of the performers.

An early microsite that I designed

Expressive

The microsite displays the interconnectedness of the four La Bâtie events by displaying elements of each event on screen at the same time. Rescaling the four quadrants of the events dynamically changes the content displayed. The intent is to entice the user to explore through discovery of content in a stimulating manner.

I worked on the color and type for this microsite

Extremely expressive

Details of the event are revealed in small pieces of content via interaction (hover, drag) — providing a fun experience for viewers to discover and manipulate the content. By maintaining feelings of mystery and curiosity, the viewer is incited to attend the event in order to achieve the whole experience.

The most expressive microsite

Pivot point

The team felt strongly that we could pursue all three of these directions, but choose to pursue the most expressive site for the opportunity to explore more experimental interactions. I proposed a merchandising-like concept, focused on the "after the event" touchpoint.
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NEW FOCUS: To create an opportunity for the audience to provide extra financial support towards drag artists after having visited the show.

Final framing

Insights and framing

I developed and framed the 3 key insights of the project. These insights were used as a communication tool to articulate a strong 'why' behind the project concept during the final presentation, especially since the team choose to pursue experimental interactions, which might have not made sense otherwise.

Insights and framing

Value proposition

Intended for users who have attended Le Poudrier's cabaret shows, this microsite "Dragshop" allows users to purchase merchandise from the shows while re-discovering their past drag experience.

Intervention

For the final intervention, I focused specifically on the insights and framing, the content design, and the final presentation to the class (design of slides, copywriting, presentation).

Art direction

Final art direction

Content strategy

Since many drag artists are severely underpaid for their shows, this microsite was created in order to further support drag artists. Users re-engage with the shows by interacting with the site and are able to provide additional financial support in the checkout page. Anticipating that users have already seen the event, the content surrounding the merchandise only features essential details.

Merchandising component of the microsite

Interaction design

The interaction design features three key interactions:

DRAG TO DISCOVER: The drag interaction reveals the content in bits and pieces, and is a slow interaction, which forces the user to be more engaged with the interactions.

Drag interaction

HOLD AND UNVEIL: When users click and hold a piece of content from the home page, the merchandise tied to the particular event and a looping video of the event is revealed. This interaction re-engages the user with the event show and commands the user’s attention to drag the merchandise to the cart.

Hold interaction

‍SCRAMBLE: By scrambling the type and imagery during the drag, the identity of the content is masked until the user commits to the drag by releasing their cursor. The user can guess at what the content might be based on their experience of the show; an ‘aha’ moment is established when the content lands as the user recalls the event.

Scramble interaction

Conclusion

(Left) microsite screenshots
(Right) a hallway design that could be part of the visual identity for the final concept

Learning takeaways

My visual design skills vastly improved during this project - I learned a lot by examining so many works from other designers and doing my own graphic experimentations. I am more comfortable working with a wide design process and improved my ability to surface the best work from a team.

Thanks for reading!

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