Dana Point Festival of Whales
Branding / Social / Merchandise
The Festival of Whales is a largely-attended annual event in Dana Point, CA that celebrates the California grey whale and it’s yearly migration from Alaska to Baja. The festival offers locals and visitors activities and events that promoting environmental education, marine conservation, and appreciation marine wildlife. While the theme remains the same annually, a new artist is chosen to represent the festival each year. In 2023, the festival team reach out to Atom and Bond to collaborate on a logo and social marketing design.
While there are some mandatories for the design each year (including a representation of the grey whale within the logo and date details that are easily accessible), the creation of the design is completely up to the artist. Even though I’m not a California native, I remember and enjoy my first and subsequent visits to the Dana Point Harbor and drew inspiration from those memories, pulling in the feeling of 70’s beach coastal with warm colors, distressed elements, and general nostalgic design.
With multichannel creative deployment across web, print, and the big 3 social networks: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the campaign was engaged with over 6x the industry standard benchmarks, and limited edition merchandise was sold out.
