Event Marketing · Print · Digital · 2023
2023 Louisville Pride Festival
"There's No Place Like Home" — poster, program, signage, email, and social media for Louisville's largest annual Pride celebration.
One campaign, every channel.
The Louisville Pride Festival draws thousands of people to Bardstown Road and Grinstead Drive in the Highlands every September — two stages, 150 vendors, drag shows, a community stage, a family zone, a wellness zone. It's a significant production, and the marketing materials have to match that scale.
For the 2023 festival, I produced the complete suite: announcement poster, 20-page festival program, four pieces of large-format on-site signage, an email newsletter, and a social media package that included both fully custom graphics and a set of Canva templates built for staff to use independently. The campaign theme was "There's No Place Like Home" — warm, local, and specific to the Highlands neighborhood while carrying a meaning that lands for every person the festival is designed to serve.
Emotional and informational on the same sheet.
The festival poster had to do two things at once: establish the "There's No Place Like Home" theme with enough visual weight that it feels like an event worth attending — then carry all the logistical detail a first-time attendee would need. Campaign photography, two stages of performers, event logistics, sponsor recognition, and a QR code for digital info, all on a single 8.5×11 sheet.
The design leads with the theme. The information architecture follows. Getting those two registers — emotional and functional — to coexist without either one collapsing was the core challenge.
Design that has to work at 50 feet.
Four pieces of large-format signage were produced for the festival grounds: a welcome sign at the festival entrance, a community stage sign, a sponsorship recognition board, and main stage wing banners. Large-format event signage is a discipline unto itself — the visual hierarchy that holds up in a PDF proof has to hold up at full size, read from across a crowd, in the middle of an outdoor event. Drag to scroll.
Warmth and a call to action — in a 600-pixel-wide container.
Email is a constrained format: variable rendering across clients, a practical maximum width of 600 pixels, and an audience making a keep/delete decision in the first two seconds. The festival newsletter was designed for Mailchimp distribution to LPF's community list.
The design leads with the festival's energy — photography, bold type, the campaign palette — before resolving into specific calls to action. It was designed to feel like a message from an organization you belong to, not a promotional blast.
Templates that work without a designer in the room.
The social media suite had two components. The first four graphics are Canva templates I designed so that Louisville Pride Foundation staff could produce on-brand social content independently throughout the festival season — locked brand elements, clear placeholder structure, no design experience required. The final two are fully custom-produced graphics: the performer lineup announcement and a performer spotlight. Those show what the template-based pieces are calibrated to match. Drag to scroll.
