Fifty-two projects to bring five thousand young people to the harbour.
The Youth Ocean Carnival — World Ocean Day Sydney's youth event at Luna Park — needed a brand built from scratch and everything that brand touches: decks, programs, books, a website, and the campaign to fill the venue.
An event for 5,000 young people, starting from a blank page.
The Youth Ocean Carnival is an annual music, art, science, sport and conservation event for World Ocean Day Sydney — CollaborOCEANS' call to ocean action, aimed squarely at Gen Z. It brings together five thousand young people from primary schools, secondary schools and universities at Luna Park and across Sydney Harbour.
When we came on board there was no brand, no website, and an event this size on the calendar. Over ten months we delivered fifty-two projects: the identity built from scratch, and then everything that identity had to carry — sponsorship pitch decks, programs, books, advertising, installations and the site.
The logo was designed to carry the vibrancy of the audience it exists for. A retro typeface bends along the curve of a wave; the circular frame around it comes from a time-lapse photograph of a ferris wheel, reading as a sun — the energy of the event in one mark. From there the system fanned out into typography, colour and templates that every one of the fifty-two projects could draw on.
The website was ours end to end — design, development, hosting, maintenance — and so was the machinery behind the event: Google Workspace, signatures and document templates, then workflow automation on Monday.com, with the team trained to run it all themselves. Ten books were designed as resources for sponsors, grant applications, schools and government — each one making the case for ocean conservation and the vision of the carnival.