BRANDING & EVENT PROMOTION: Downtown Gilroy Beer Crawl (Year 2)

2024 was my second year promoting the Beer Crawl in Downtown Gilroy. Since this year's event is closer to Halloween, they wanted to incorporate some spooky elements, utilizing a skeleton as the event's mascot. We kept as many of the core elements as possible along with the new imagery, to carry the brand recognition through.

I relied heavily on sourcing AI images for this year’s event. My prompting skills grew as I figured out how to get the tool to produce the images I needed to convey the right messages.

BRANDING & EVENT PROMOTION: Downtown Gilroy Beer Crawl (Year 1)

Branding & event promotion for the GDBA Annual Downtown Gilroy Beer Crawl. The signature garlic bulb is incorporated into this logo, as in all of their other events, for brand consistency and recognition. This also makes it stand out among the other beer festivals in the area. The motive for this rebrand was to move away from the Halloween theme and toward Oktoberfest.

BRANDING & EVENT PROMOTION: Downtown Gilroy Holiday Festival & Parade

Gilroy Downtown Business Association (GDBA) has put on their Holiday Festival & Parade for years, but didn’t yet have a cohesive brand with which to present their event. They reached out to Sour Pea Design to create a recognizable, warm, playful, unique brand that would help them stand out from other similar events in the area.

The logo, launched in 2023, contains hand-drawn, interlocking lettering to establish the event as nostalgic, community-centered, and specific to their event alone. The expressive line work and garlic bulb imagery in the illustration of the mascot and supporting elements aligns with the parent GDBA brand, giving it a place in their annual event family. It drives home the elements of tradition, history and consistency, while still feeling playful, friendly, casual and welcoming. The color palette feels vintage, warm, fresh and in line with the parent brand.

BRANDING: Gilroy Downtown Business Association

GDBA’s previous logo had multiple aspects keeping the brand from reaching its intended audience in an authentic way. It read as “Downtown Gilroy Business Association,” which caused name confusion. It had thin serifs and script text, which were difficult to read when scaled down. The layout and typography felt stiff and the “g” was out of alignment with the rest of the word. “Business Association” didn’t have a connection to the rest of the logo and felt like an afterthought.

The new logo does a much better job of conveying the vision and mission of the brand for a number of reasons. Right off the bat, the name reads properly, as “Gilroy Downtown Business Association.” The well-established “g” from the original brand, along with the signature green color, helps carry brand recognition through to the new design. Stronger serifs help with scalability. Including the word “downtown” in the main portion of the logo and connecting it to the “gilroy” with the garlic bulb emphasizes the focus on the downtown area. elements that touch, overlap and reach for one another enhance the brand value of community and connection.

EVENT: Downtown Live, presented by Gilroy Downtown Business Association

Downtown Live is an annual summer music series, organized and presented by Gilroy Downtown Business Association. The mission of GDBA, and Downtown Live by extension, is to build community pride by re-stablishing Downtown Gilroy as a safe, revitalized, livable and economically vibrant area, rich in diversity of people, unique restaurants, specialty retail, community events and entertainment.

In 2023 Sour Pea Design took on promotion of this 8-week event. Over the course of the 8 weeks, the event has seen substantial growth in all measurable areas of success, including attendance, drink and merch sales, engagement on social and feedback from the community.

BRANDING: Sour Pea Design Brand Refresh 2023

Take a sneak peek at the 2023 Sour Pea Design Brand Refresh.

bright, fresh moodboard including several shades of green and yellow, plus pink, aqua & lavender

Sour Pea Design moodboard - bright, energetic, fresh, unique, eclectic, imperfect, strong, retro, imaginative, thoughtful, organized, playful, fun, welcoming, warm, open - grass green, pastel green, lime greenish-yellow, baby pink, aqua, rich yellow, light yellow, yellow-tan, lavender

k with some work-in-progress sketches for sour pea design's 2023 rebrand

Sketchbook with working ideas for the 2023 Brand Refresh of Sour Pea Design

Moodboard WEDNESDAY

Switching it up from a Moodboard Monday in honor of our girl, Wednesday, queen of woe.

Color palette + moodboard inspired by Wednesday Addams: black & white stripes, black lace, spiderweb, vintage typewriter, hair in two braids, desaturated close-up of a cello

COLORS: Black (#000000) | Graphite: (#323232) | Nightmoth (#53393B) | Bone (#FFFFFF)

Canva fonts inspired by Wednesday: IM Fell English, Wednesday, Manuver, Rumble Brave

Fonts I'm Currently Digging | Vol. 01

Loving these fonts from Canva right now!

Barbra - a funky, expressive, retro display font

Pluma - a hand-drawn, sans-serif font, usable for display or even a subhead

Sanchez - an extended slab-serif with just the right amount of personality

Sweet Apricot - a sweet, approachable script accent font

#fontaddict #ilovefonts #fontcollector #fontcollection #fontstyle #brandinspiration #funkyfont #seriffont #scriptfont #accentfont #canvafonts #madewithcanva #fontinspo #favoritefonts #logodesigner #typography #fontbundle #retrofont