Soundcheck Festival Website
August 21st, 2019 by Gage Pacifera
Harmonic Northwest has been leading an effort to put on a new festival that will take place in venues throughout Port Townsend before the inaugural THING at Fort Worden this weekend. The festival, called Soundcheck, features a slew of performances from local musicians as well as a number of special events geared toward the out-of-town crowd.
You can check out the website here:
The promotional materials for the event were created by Harmonic Northwest, Pinecone Design, and Madze Creations. Other promotional help came from MyCityScene, Codepress, and a number of others mentioned below. All of the festival supporters and volunteers are local, btw, which feels appropriate given the local focus of the festival itself.
The Design
Harmonic Northwest led the design of this effort. The graphics are inspired by local features: water, mountains, victorian houses, the pulp mill, submarines, and of course Port Townsend’s iconic statue, Galatea. The graphics use vectorized shapes created in Adobe Illustrator. Chen Pollina from Pinecone Design created most of the print assets (posters, programs, etc.) as well as the online ad layouts.
The Development
Kiyota Sage of Madze Designs put together a blazing-fast gatsby setup for this site (not to be confused with our similarly-named Gatsby WordPress theme), which marks HNW’s first foray into that framework as well as a first foray into a number of its base components including react, styled components, and GraphQL. Harmonic Northwest did the bulk of the development after the initial setup with some additional support from Kiyota.
The events listings are provided by MyCityScene, a software-as-a-service online events calendar company based here in Port Townsend and owned by Frank Depalma. This is a huge part of the website and we are so thankful Frank volunteered to manage this piece! MyCityScene features shared online calendaring that is able to display all important event details including title, description, venue, location, thumbnail, links to social media, etc. with lots of advanced embeddable display options.
The Marketing
The festival received a grant from the Port Townsend Arts Commission that gave us a budget for marketing the festival to out-of-town folks. We placed ads on thestranger.com, wweek.com, Instagram, and Facebook. Some of these ran directly alongside THING advertisements, giving the two-part package a little more weight.
Local marketing efforts included posters that our volunteers put up at local venues and bulletin boards around town, programs, online promotion from the Chamber of Jefferson County, PT Main Street, and KPTZ, and a strong word-of-mouth and word-of-social-media campaign led by our volunteer steering committee.