( W'04 — the festival itself )
Slipshod Gathering
Designing a living experience
( The short version )
Slipshod Gathering is a three-day independent arts and music festival I founded in 2024. It combines storytelling, scenography, spatial design and community culture into one cohesive world.
I led the project end to end — from brand identity and worldbuilding to site design, marketing and on-site production. Slipshod demonstrates how experience design can extend beyond screens into physical environments, behaviour and culture.
- Founder & creative director
- Worldbuilding
- Brand identity system
- Spatial & scenic design
- Experience design
- Marketing & visual campaigns
- Artist relations & stage curation
- On-site production coordination
( The challenge )
Turning vision into reality
Create a fully-licensed, safe and functional festival experience while maintaining a handcrafted, narrative-driven atmosphere. With a capacity of 500, Slipshod needed to feel intimate yet ambitious — designing systems that scaled from imagination to reality.
The goal was to ensure every operational decision — licensing, layout, lighting, signage, programming — reinforced the experience rather than diluting it.
A brand identity that captured its magic and rebellion
A site plan balancing flow, safety and immersion
Three distinct stages tied together by one world
A volunteer and artist experience that felt collaborative
We didn’t build a festival. We built a story people could walk through.
( Three stages — three narrative tones to move between )
The Maw
A mythical portal to the underground, being harnessed for its frequencies.
The He!p Desk?
A post-apocalyptic woodland rave of broken tech and rogue signals.
Newage Faire
Traveling music and circus stage — its wagons have been on the road for eons.
( Applying UX principles to the real world )
From design thinking to dirt: building a festival like a product
Slipshod was approached like a product. Designed through research, empathy, prototyping, and iteration. Every touchpoint, from music flow to site layout, was part of a cohesive experience system.
User research & empathy
I studied crowd behaviour at small events to design for emotion, not just movement, shaping stages, lighting, and space around human energy and connection.
Journey mapping
The lineup and site plan were built as user flows, guiding people from discovery to climax to calm, using rhythm, light, and contrast to sustain attention.
Iteration & systems thinking
The event acted as a live prototype. Feedback loops shaped daily adjustments across sound, signage, and crowd flow. Behind the scenes, operational systems were designed with the same clarity and cohesion as a digital product.
Pixels became pathways. Users became people. The experience was alive.
( The campaign )
Building the hype: designing the story around the story
Slipshod's marketing wasn't just promotion, it was worldbuilding. Every post, lineup reveal, and visual asset was part of an unfolding narrative that invited people into the Slipshod universe before they ever stepped on site.
The Slipshod story wasn't told to people. It was told with them.
( On site )
When the story came alive
Slipshod isn't something people attend, it's something they step inside of. From the moment people arrived, the world unfolded around them: light bleeding through trees, towers rising from the forest floor, sound drifting across open fields, and characters moving through the crowd.
Slipshod was built to feel alive, a place where music, art, and people shaped the atmosphere together rather than being separate parts.
( The outcome )
From concept → movement
Slipshod Gathering sold out its debut year and generated over 1M+ organic impressions across Instagram with 100% positive attendee feedback. The identity grew into a community narrative that people participated in, shared, and contributed to, proving the brand was more than an event, it was a place people felt connected to.
No paid ads. No external PR. Just identity, community and story.
ticket sales
SOLD OUT
Every ticket, first year.
social impressions
1m+
Organic, across the campaign.
positive feedback
100%
Of responses received.
Signals from the woods
Messages left behind in the woods.
Transmissions from those who came before.
Absolutely loved Slipshod. Wicked crowd, wicked vibe, banging tunes and can tell how much love goes into it. Big love from the Frequencies crew. X