Over the past thirty years, Essence Festival of Culture (EFOC) has been a beacon of Black culture and community. More than just an entertainment festival, it is a cultural institution; whereas other music festivals are built and booked based on chart standings, label relationships, and streaming algorithms, Essence Festival of Culture is curated by and for its audience. In celebration of the festival’s 30th Anniversary, we wanted to create a visual world that would highlight the power of community, the richness of culture, and the unstoppable spirit of the Black Diaspora. So we rallied our work around a powerful affirmation that positions EFOC as the ultimate destination to fall even more in love with all things Black: “We Love Us.” This idea serves as a call to action, inviting the community to unite and celebrate culture in a place of joy, pride, and solidarity. Using design as a way to honor and embolden the Black community, we created a system that at once embraces the festival’s brand roots and modernizes them. We studied collateral from EFOC’s first ever event, and used the colors from the key graphic as inspiration. We then tuned the colors up to reflect the vibrancy of New Orleans, the festival’s home. The system’s core color—a vibrant purple-blue—is supported by a flexible, energetic color palette that feels unique in the festival circuit. Because the festival stands as a bold declaration of Black empowerment, we wanted to choose typography that was impactful, unique, and stood out proudly. We chose headline typeface NaN Holo Gigawide by NaN Studio for the rectangular counters and rounded curves that make it an outlier in the world of neo-Grotesk fonts, speaking to the uniqueness and joy found within the Black community. We paired the typography with a drop shadow, which acts as an anchor that visually lifts up the voices of the festival. With so many offerings and experiences, EFOC had a unique opportunity to make them collectable and interactive; so we assigned each experience its own individual color combination from the expansive palette and created a badge system that follows the drop shadow. A set of line graphics follows the angle of the drop shadow, adding textural moments to photography and text.