Harvest Music Festival

About the Client:

The Harvest Music Festival, formerly known as the Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival, is Atlantic Canada’s premier music festival. Fredericton comes alive for six days each September as Harvest brings together 400+ musicians, 150 performances, 27 stages across 6 city blocks. 

The Challenge

The Harvest Jazz & Blues Festival approached the Ginger Agency to assist with the transition to the new Harvest Music Festival name, as well as evolving their creative and brand strategies to follow suit.

With Harvest being in its 30th year, we needed to approach this challenge with a careful appreciation for how much the festival means to Fredericton. A carefully considered plan was needed to manage the transition carefully.

The Solution:

The Ginger Agency team first worked closely with Harvest stakeholders to reimagine the creative look and feel for the new Festival name. We did our research, looking across the global music festival scene to provide a wider context to the challenge. 

Next, we developed a creative strategy to support the new name. This included the corporate logo, and supporting look and feel. Our team worked closely with the Harvest Board of Directors to put the necessary elements in place. A keystone element of this process was to reimagine the iconic Blues Tent stage backdrop. This backdrop is a critical component of the festival experience and would be featured prominently in photography of musicians playing the Festival. This familiar scene is used in marketing materials for the Festival, as well as regional and provincial tourism campaigns.

Each year, Harvest develops a unique look and feel for the Festival creative, spanning posters, on-site signage, merch, and promotional materials. Our next challenge was to dig into these elements to ensure that the creative strategy supported the name change, as well as paid proper homage to the 30th anniversary of the festival.

Our team then went to work implementing the 30th anniversary creative strategy across hundreds of pieces of design, from Festival passes, to animated motion graphic pieces that would appear in ads; social media; through to the content that would play alongside the stages.