Festive Design for Freaks

Navigating the web and gathering information to make important decisions can be ridiculously stressful at times. Graphic designers sometimes forget functionality and focus on some abstract art that gets glanced over as a web-surfer quickly abandons the page.

For the past two summers I have gone to Bonnaroo, a four day music and arts festival. Last year Bonnaroo attracted 80,000 guests, and hosted over 150 performers. To handle this kind of volume, organization and functionality is essential. I found out everything I needed to know about bonnaroo from their website; every musician, attraction, and application that awaited me and easily purchased my ticket via their website.

And being an Art festival the website must remain pretty and enticing while accessible. So the opening page of this year’s Bonnaroo displays the colorful action-packed banner that remains informative and useful. It instantly reveals what “Bonnaroo” is with a patched together image of a huge crowd infont of a large stage and artistic carnival attractions. All the well known aspects of the festival are placed in the banner: stage, large tent, ferris wheel, fountain, and large “Bonnaroo” arc that stands at the entrance to the festival grounds. I know first hand the lunacy, the outlandish celebrations and the mind bending hysterics that take place at this festival and the banner triggers these reveries and gets me excited.

The page layout is also well done. Drop down tabs under the banner direct users to all aspects of the festival in eight specific categories. On the right there are rotating photos drawing attention to the artists and keeping the user watching to see what comes up next. To the left of that is the “news”. A large “JUNE 11-14 MANCHESTER, TN” makes it very clear when to quit your current job and buy plane tickets. Below that is all recent announcements about the festival. All the text is a clear and legible helvetica. Another aid in advertisement is the consistent color theme throughout the website. Now whenever I see this color turquoise with orange, green, yellow and red I will think, Bonnaroo.

Most importantly, with a single click on a miniature poster on the bottom right you can see the entire artist line up for the festival, headliners first. Maybe the organizers are just trying to make it simple for all the burnt-out veteran freaks who need to order their tickets online but for the attention deficit user with little spare time, like myself this website design gave me all the info I need to get my ticket and sparked my forgotten lust for a romping summer celebration. Quit your job and check it out.

Baraka

Better late than never, and for me it was worth the wait. I rented Baraka, a nonverbal film by Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson. Baraka, a sufi word meaning blessing or a spiritual power believed to be possessed by certain persons or objects has no plot or story line and is comprised of stunning cinematic scenes brilliantly strung together. It opens with a scene in the Himalayan mountains; a snow colored monkey is sitting in a hot spring looking pensive, wise and slightly melancholy. Deeply thought provoking scenes are woven together juxtaposing variations of life on earth such as Buddhist monks lighting hundreds candles in a temple to scenes of war and flamethrowers to traffic in China. The film was shot in the very expensive, extremely high definition TODD-AO 70mm format. This made the scenes sharp and stunning and conveyed the overwhelming beauty and horror of development on this planet. A computer-controlled camera was developed by these filmmakers to capture the time-lapse shots, such as clouds passing over white mountains, a solar eclipse and Park Avenue rush hour traffic.

The film has a deeply spiritual aspect as almost every type of religion is documented, from Muslim pilgrimages to tribal African dances, which gave me a profound understanding of the fundamentally divine aspect of human beings. And yet the pendulum swings both ways and we see the destructive powers of our species and our tragic nature. The film left me contemplating evolution and what modern man had been reduced to and successfully achieved. I saw that innate spiritual nature of human beings combined with fast food, war, and pollution; indeed the reoccurring scene of the solar eclipse throughout the film was a nice metaphor of this pretty tragedy. I have been telling everyone to go see this film. If anything its aesthetic beauty and moving music by composer Michael Stearns is enough attraction, but the kaleidoscopic view of life on earth is so essential for anyone who wants to gain a bird’s eye view of life on earth and our part in it. Its great to see with a few friends and then talk about the various thoughts it left each with, and there will be many