W'02 — the festival itself
Slipshod Gathering
Designing a living experience
The short version
Slipshod Gathering is a three-day independent arts and music festival. It started in 2023 as The Slipshod Experience — bespoke immersive parties, and stages and arenas built for other people's festivals — and became a festival of its own in 2025. It combines storytelling, scenography, spatial design and community culture into one cohesive world.
I led the project end to end — from brand identity and worldbuilding to site design, marketing and on-site production. Slipshod demonstrates how experience design can extend beyond screens into physical environments, behaviour and culture.
- Founder & creative director
- Worldbuilding
- Brand identity system
- Spatial & scenic design
- Experience design
- Marketing & visual campaigns
- Artist relations & stage curation
- On-site production coordination
The challenge
Turning vision into reality
Create a fully-licensed, safe and functional festival experience while maintaining a handcrafted, narrative-driven atmosphere. With a capacity of 500, Slipshod needed to feel intimate yet ambitious — designing systems that scaled from imagination to reality.
The goal was to ensure every operational decision — licensing, layout, lighting, signage, programming — reinforced the experience rather than diluting it.
A brand identity that captured its magic and rebellion
A site plan balancing flow, safety and immersion
Three distinct stages tied together by one world
A volunteer and artist experience that felt collaborative
We didn’t build a festival. We built a story people could walk through.
( Three stages — three narrative tones to move between )
The Maw
A mythical portal to the underground, being harnessed for its frequencies.
The He!p Desk?
A post-apocalyptic woodland rave of broken tech and rogue signals.
Newage Faire
Traveling music and circus stage — its wagons have been on the road for eons.
Applying UX principles to the real world
From design thinking to dirt: building a festival like a product
Slipshod was approached like a product. Designed through research, empathy, prototyping, and iteration. Every touchpoint, from music flow to site layout, was part of a cohesive experience system.
User research & empathy
I studied crowd behaviour at small events to design for emotion, not just movement, shaping stages, lighting, and space around human energy and connection.
Journey mapping
The lineup and site plan were built as user flows, guiding people from discovery to climax to calm, using rhythm, light, and contrast to sustain attention.
Iteration & systems thinking
The event acted as a live prototype. Feedback loops shaped daily adjustments across sound, signage, and crowd flow. Behind the scenes, operational systems were designed with the same clarity and cohesion as a digital product.
The campaign
Building the hype: designing the story around the story
Slipshod's marketing wasn't just promotion, it was worldbuilding. Every post, lineup reveal, and visual asset was part of an unfolding narrative that invited people into the Slipshod universe before they ever stepped on site.
On site
When the story came alive
Slipshod isn't something people attend, it's something they step inside of. From the moment people arrived, the world unfolded around them: light bleeding through trees, towers rising from the forest floor, sound drifting across open fields, and characters moving through the crowd.
Slipshod was built to feel alive, a place where music, art, and people shaped the atmosphere together rather than being separate parts.
The outcome
From concept → movement
Slipshod Gathering sold out both its years — 350 tickets in 2025 and again in 2026 — and grew its Instagram following from 4,000 to 8,400 without a penny of paid promotion. The identity grew into a community narrative that people participated in, shared, and contributed to: more than an event, a place people felt connected to.
Deliberately over-crewed for the capacity — that's where the money went. Into the world, not the margin.
No paid ads. No external PR. Just identity, community and story.
two years running
SOLD OUT ×2
350 tickets, 2025 and 2026.
Instagram followers
4,000 → 8,400
Across the two campaigns, all organic.
people on site were crew
~1 in 3
~190 working, 350 paying.
Signals from the woods
Messages left behind in the woods.
Transmissions from those who came before.
Absolutely loved Slipshod. Wicked crowd, wicked vibe, banging tunes and can tell how much love goes into it. Big love from the Frequencies crew. X
