UUP Festival
SCOPE:
BRANDING
GRAPHIC DESIGN
YEAR:
2025
I've been performing in the Polish hip-hop underground for years. When it came to choosing a final branding project for my Graphic Design certificate, designing a fictional festival for that scene wasn't a creative exercise — it was building something I actually understood from the inside.
Problem
Underground hip-hop in Poland has a specific aesthetic problem: most festival branding either goes too mainstream (generic EDM-style visuals) or too rough (DIY zine aesthetics that don't scale to production). I wanted to design something that felt credible to the scene — raw and bold — while being professional enough to work across every real-world touchpoint: tickets, stage banners, city posters, social media.
Process
I started with the name and positioning: UUP — Underground Hip-Hop At Its Finest. That phrase set the tone for every visual decision that followed. For the color palette, I anchored on red and black — high contrast, high energy, and a nod to the confrontational aesthetic of the genre — then balanced it with dark green and steel blue to add depth without softening the edge. Typography needed to be bold and readable at distance (posters, banners) while staying structured enough for the brand book. I built the system in layers: logo → color → type → applications. Every mockup was chosen to test a real production scenario: a hanging banner at a truss, outdoor city posters on a weathered wall, two-day tickets with QR stubs. The brand book includes usage rules so anyone could apply the system without my involvement.
Outcome
The project earned my Graphic Design certificate. More importantly, it proved to me that the strongest briefs come from genuine understanding of an audience — not just research, but lived experience. The system is production-ready: every element was tested against real-world scale and surface.
