Marfa, TX
Personal Experience is the Best Inspiration
My first visit to Texas was actually a trip to Marfa back in 2016. It was like no place I had ever been & I had zero expectations except to have fun with my friends. After what felt like traveling via planes, trains AND automobiles to get there, I found it to be a wonderfully weird destination & an experience I couldn't wait to share with others.
I used my personal experience to guide my design for the city's tourism branding. The most exciting & unique part of the visit for me was the road trip, which is also a nearly unavoidable element to visiting Marfa at all, so I knew I wanted to get future travelers excited for that experience.
In designing the homepage for the city, I also designed a sister site for a music festival held there every fall. I wanted both sites to mirror each other but with their own personalities; both wide & open like the high desert itself but with contrasting temperaments like day & night.
Project Overview
Initially I wanted to pull inspiration from what I remembered of my trip; wide, open skies, the road stretched out endlessly before you, and a Western theme but with a lighter, modern twist.
Sketches
This was indeed the most fun aspect of the project, as I had a lot of ideas to pull from. In sketching for the logo I tried elements inspired by high noon shadows, the massive cinderblock artworks found at the Cinati Foundation, the mysterious Marfa lights, and of course the open road.
Drafts
After deciding on a logo direction, I further pushed the open road idea by wanting to incorporate matching imagery as backgrounds for both the landing page & the brochure. The delicate nature of the logo allowed for the usage of prominent imagery.
Final Design
Even though I chose one direction for the logo, I was able to pull elements from the other logo iterations for other designs of the project. I used high noon shadows and marfa lights as hover effects in both the landing pages. I also tried to give each page a sense of "wide, open space" by creating a set of scrolling cards to lay out information so that the user scrolls sideways instead of vertically. Finally, with the columns of the brochure being so tall, I made sure to incorporate a lot of sky imagery to give future travelers a taste of what's to come.
