VIVA PHX 2026 Identity

The City of Phoenix’s swirling phoenix has decades of public recognition. The VIVA PHX mark references the City of Phoenix swirl, but refreshes its style for our context, and adds flames. The flames restore the bird’s origin in fire and reframe the desert heat (which the most people avoid like the plague when framing Phoenix positively) as a source of value: difficulty is the condition under which resilient culture gets made. The people of the desert are stress tested and the flaming Phoenix mark is encoded with the legacy of civic pride and the fire of that stress.

The identity is generative: geometry and color are governed by fixed rules, so the team can give every venue, show, and channel its own look while everything reads as one festival. Festival branding often relies on a degree of uniformity and gets away with it, because a typical festival has a few key graphics. VIVA PHX would need 50+ posters, so I knew that if it all looked the same it’d be hard to tell apart and quite boring. A rules-based system is the fix. Coherence in a project this large depends on use of a malleable network of elements, rather than just one fixed set. 

The principal components of this system are the grid, the type hierarchy and the voronoi motif. All three of these can be generated and regenerated, composed and recomposed, in infinite combinations with the color palette. 

The voronoi field is my way of visualizing the strategic premise through math.

A voronoi pattern is a set of cells that exist only because of where their seed points sit relative to one another. It’s a proximity generating structure, which visualizes the proximity of one seed to another, which is the same thing I argue that the festival represents about the city.

I built it as code rather than a drawn asset, so that I could generate the initial pattern based on the real coordinates of the festival’s venues on a map, and so that fresh generations could be made from random seeds by anyone: infinite unique shapes while all are unmistakably the same system. It can be recombined freely with the grid and type, which is what makes the brand feel alive across fifty or one hundred surfaces instead of stamped onto them.

I built everything with a single grid that keeps it all aligned: twelve columns + a fixed baseline, with a twenty-four-column extension for the densest lineup posters and complex layouts that need finer placement.

Because the extended grid is a subdivision of the standard one(factor of 2x), a layout built at either scale is compatible with the other. The same structural logic is applied across print, web and environmental graphics. The grid is what lets tons of assets stay obviously related without being identical. It also makes for easy and concise typography even with hugely disparate artist names, easing the job of the designer.

I built the identity using only one typeface; TT Neoris Variable by TypeType. With only one face, hierarchy is carried by the variable axis paired with size and grid placement. Type is unversally set flush left, tightly tracked, short leading.

The defining typographic gesture for any music festival is the lineup, which can be a real beast for designers to wrangle; long names, short names, conflicting requirements, etc. For this identity, I built the lineup as a cascade, where size and weight drop together tier by tier and which makes use of the grid for sequential indents, so an act’s place on the bill is legible before you read a name. This was intended to solve a common problem for music festival design; disputes over artist name hierarchy and size. I developed 5 internally tracked tiers, which were contracted and tied to type placement and size in the final assets.

Having hierarchy encoded as a rule, not a per-layout decision made the final touchpoints efficient to produce. Heavier and larger means higher, every time, with color reserved for CTAs, metadata and links.

The brand successfully carried from a one-day street closure to a six-day festival without losing coherence, and the team produced 600+ graphics across all touchpoints seamlessly within the system, from LED walls and stage banners down to menu graphics, individual show posters and bumper stickers.

VIVA PHX 2026 closed with an estimated 12,590 attendees across 32 events at 20 venues, 136 creators on the bill, 28 events free with RSVP. Instagram drew 2.1M organic views and 176,875 accounts reached, the majority new. The site took 35,147 pageviews in festival week. A third of surveyed attendees traveled to Phoenix specifically for it; most rated their likelihood of returning a perfect ten. 

I authored the brand and mark in 2024 with Collin D Fletcher‘s creative direction, and then in 2026 I became the creative director and built the creative and strategic architecture; website, audience framework, strategic and conceptual direction, and the copy, sponsor materials, and reporting that carried it to partners. Matt Baquet has acted as Executive Director across all years I’ve worked on VIVA PHX. The festival is produced by Eros Works.