Bringing The Yellow King to Bigger Venues
The mission
The Antilopes, the very talented hip hop music collective from Greece is bringing back the very successful series of events dubbed The Yellow King! This is the second year that The Yellow King is going to be running in Salonica, a city famous for its cultural output.
The project’s success will come from creating a compelling, powerful identity and materials that will be familiar in the established fans of the brand, but also from taking it to the next level, reflecting the higher quality of the venue for this year’s events, the improved strategy for the project, and the very fruitful creative journey that The Antilopes themselves have undertaken this past year.
The Output
We went on to redesign the logo, create a collection of social media graphics, a series of posters for the different dates and guest DJs, and some animated GIFs to promote the event.
The Impact
Since the project has launched, The Yellow King has been a tremendous success, achieving a much wider reach in the social media campaigns, resulting in double the attendance in the event itself, while priming the now loyal following of the brand for next year’s events.
A new project on the works
The Antilopes are a very talented Greek musical collective, performing in more than a dozen events all around Greece every year. Now in their second decade, the Antilopes are focusing on finding the hidden little gems in hip hop music, delivering DJ sets to an audience that wants to experience much more than the mainstream has to offer.
The Yellow King is a short series of events in Salonica, where the Antilopes share the decks with fellow DJs, bringing new, exciting sounds into the mix. Filled with the atmosphere of the winter season, and deeply inspired by the horror themes of the novel of the same name, The Yellow King is almost a mystical experience.
After a very successful round of events in their first year, the Antilopes decided to double down on keeping this project going. This meant that they needed to work with a bigger venue, more renowned artists, better social media coverage. They really liked what they had, but they had to take it up a notch. On the other hand, there was an existing audience of the project that would have to relate with any new work put out there – these are the people who made a second year feasible, after all.
New Challenges
The first challenge was addressing the limitations of their original logo. While the typography had an antique feel that connected with the values of the brand, the thin letterforms, designed to look like cuneiform writing, wouldn’t be as readable in printed applications. The occult symbol, taken verbatim from an alchemical book and digitized, was a bit lopsided, and as a result was very hard to center. This can look unprofessional to some audiences too, so this needed to be remedied.
The most important challenge, however, was the matter of real estate on the posters and social media graphics. There are number of new pieces of information that need to be included in the second season’s posters, including logos of the guest artists, the venue, the local Antilopes that organize the event (Vegapunk and Twicechild), as well as Granny’s Parlor, a companion label that would release mixtapes connected with the project. So much information competing for the viewer’s attention!
Stronger, bolder, enigmatic
We presented the client with an even stronger redesign of the brand. We balanced the brandmark without sacrificing its handmade feel, and we pushed the logotype even further in that direction, hand-drawing bold, arcane letterforms based on the ancient Phoenician alphabet. We introduced the idea of a brighter gold-like yellow on distressed texture. It further drove down the already established themes of cosmic horror, eldtrich magic and arcane writing that the loyal fans of the brand had already embraced.
It’s not an easy pill to swallow of course – These faux-Phoenician letterforms aren’t immediately recognizable by either Greek or English language speakers. This was one of the concern of our clients during the feedback process, but they decided to go forward with this. Similar to reading an old, dusty tome full of forbidden knowledge, the viewers need to give themselves a second before they get in the secret. People viewing the Yellow King logo are now researchers, disciples. And that’s a win in both our book and our clients’.
“Whoa! We like it! We didn’t expect so much detail, especially in the figure, but we really like it!”
The result
The Antilopes started pushing the new identity of The Yellow King on November 3rd on social media, and it’s already a whopping success! People are responding well to the new visual identity, and The Yellow King’s brand is now more impressionable in people’s minds. Social Media reach has reached two times more people than last year’s campaign in just a matter of days.
With this campaign, the Antilopes were ready to host their event in WonderWall, an amazing roof top bar in the centre of Salonica, that can accommodate twice as many people than The Yellow King events had last year. For their premiere event, they were able to host the internationally acclaimed DJ Propo 88, while the rest of the lineup is yet to be announced.
