PORTFOLIO
A group of people with hands stacked together in front of a stage at the Big Sky Festival, with fans wearing cowboy hats and wristbands.

A country music and culture festival built for the wide open spaces of Missoula, Montana. Big Sky Festival is a multi-day music festival celebrating country music, cowboy lifestyle and culture.

Designed for country music lovers, campfires, cold beers, live music, and a chance to let their inner cowboy or cowgirl out.

BIG SKY FESTIVAL

Client
Big Sky Festival

Year
2026

Logo Design, Brand Indentity, Merch, Packaging & Print Design

Logo for the Big Sky Festival with a silhouette of mountains and a sun or moon in the background, on a maroon background.

The Origin

Big Sky Festival started with a simple brief: create a festival brand that feels like Montana itself. Not a themed experience, not a costume, the genuine warmth, space, and freedom of Big Sky Country.

The challenge was avoiding every Western cliché in the book. No cartoonish cowboys. No wanted poster typography. No horseshoes or sheriff badges. The brief demanded something that felt authentically rooted in the landscape and culture of Montana without tipping into fancy dress.

The solution came from the landscape itself. Montana's nickname is Big Sky Country, named for the vast, uninterrupted sky that defines the state. That sky became the logo. The mark is a silhouette of the Rocky Mountain range specific to Montana, with the sky sitting as negative space at the heart of the mark. Simple, ownable, and rooted in place. The kind of logo you could draw from memory after seeing it once.

Poster for the Country Music & Culture Festival featuring bold black text on a rust-colored background, with a silhouette of a longhorn steer at the bottom.

The primary logo mark is built around the Rocky Mountain silhouette, the actual mountain range that defines Montana's horizon. The negative space within the mark represents the big sky the festival is named after. It's minimal by design. A festival brand has a lot of moving parts, posters, wristbands, stage backdrops, merch, signage and the logo needs to sit quietly within all of it rather than compete with it.

The mark works at every scale. Embossed on a wristband at 15mm or printed on a stage backdrop at 10 metres wide, it holds. That scalability was an important part of the design process.

The full logo lockup pairs the mark with BIG SKY FESTIVAL set in a bold, characterful typeface that carries that county-western DNA without feeling like a period costume. Confident, wide, and built to last.

The Logo

Large outdoor concert with a crowd, a woman on someone's shoulders raising her arms, a stage with musicians playing, and big screens showing the performers. Many people wear hats and are enjoying the music on a sunny day.

TheTypography

Crowd at Big Sky Festival with people wearing wristbands, enjoying music and activities, some holding arms and drinks, stage in the background, and a scenic outdoor setting with clear skies.

The typography system uses multiple typefaces deliberately. This is a festival brand, not a corporate identity. Variety in type creates energy, movement, and visual interest across a complex brand system that spans posters, signage, merch, digital, and print.

The headline typeface carries the Western heritage of the brand, bold, wide, and authoritative. Supporting typefaces bring structure and legibility to information-heavy assets like the festival schedule and wayfinding signage. The system is varied but intentional. Every typeface earns its place.

A display of two fonts: Aldivaro regular and Bacalar semi expanded, showing uppercase, lowercase, digits, and symbols, with a cactus illustration on the right side.

The palette is entirely drawn from the Montana landscape and Western heritage.

Honky Tonk Red: The colour of worn leather, old barns, and sunset skies. The dominant brand colour that gives Big Sky Festival its warmth and confidence.

Prairi Sabd: The dusty, sun-bleached earth of the Montana plains. Used as a secondary background and supporting colour throughout the system.

Rawhide: Deep and grounding, used for type and structural elements. Feels like weathered wood and saddle leather.

Big Sky Blue: You cant have a brand name like Big Sky and not include a blue within the colour palette. this offers a nice contrasting colour to the warmer tones of the reds and browns.

Together the palette gives a sun-warmed, earthy, and completely at home for a cowboy/girl in the open plains of Montana.

The Colours Scheme:

Graphic design featuring the large letters 'A' and 'a' on a dark red background, with text labels indicating 'Primary Typeface' at the top, 'Headings' at the top right, 'Obvia' at the bottom left, and 'Black' at the bottom right.
Banners for the Big Sky Festival in Missoula, Montana, advertising the country music and culture festival.
Color palette with five horizontal color swatches labeled from top to bottom: Honky Tonk Red, Rodeo Rust, Big Sky Blue, Prairie Sand, Rawhide, with their respective HEX codes.
A crowd attending the Big Sky Festival in Missoula, Montana in 2026. The festival features a stage with performers and a large banner reading 'BIG SKY FESTIVAL' with a mountain and sky graphic. People are wearing cowboy hats and holding drinks while enjoying the outdoor concert.
Colorful directional sign at a rodeo or country fair indicating locations and distances to store, stable, saloon, stage, and exit, with people dressed in cowboy attire gathered around.
A smiling couple walking outdoors during sunset, with the man having his arm around the woman's shoulders. Both are wearing matching brown T-shirts with a white mountain graphic and the words "BIG SKY FESTIVAL". The woman has wavy blond hair, and the man has short brown hair and a beard. The background features a rural landscape with blurred trees and a barn.
Group of people at an outdoor event placing their hands together in a stack, wearing festival wristbands and bracelets, with some holding drinks in the background.
Young woman at a festival showing a digital ticket on her phone, while a person scans her ticket with a barcode scanner. She is wearing a cowboy hat and denim jacket, with several bracelets on her wrist. In the background, other people are standing, some wearing cowboy hats and plaid shirts, against a sunset setting.
A black and gray trucker cap with the logo and text for Big Sky Festival, draped over a wooden saddle on a rustic barn wall.
A woman wearing a maroon T-shirt with a list of names and event details on the back, standing outdoors on a farm, looking at fields and barns in the distance.
A commemorative pin for the Big Sky Festival, featuring the festivals logo and the festival's name encircling it, placed on a brown plaid fabric background.
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FINAL SAY

Big Sky Festival is a conceptual project built entirely from the brief up: Concept, strategy, naming, visual identity, and brand system. Just the question: what would a festival brand designed for country folk look like if it was built to feel like the place it lives in?

Montana answered that question. The landscape, the culture, the sky: it's all in there, in a reall cowboy culture state.

This project pushed me to think about festival branding as a complete system rather than just a logo. From a wristband to a stage backdrop, from a website to a merch range, every touchpoint had to feel like Big Sky Festival. I think it does.

Aaron Moriarty

93 Design Studio

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