Festival brand work for Wellington City Council

Wellington City Council · Civic Brand Identity · ArtSplash & Pasifika Festival Shooting Star Programme · 2024 → ongoing

An ongoing relationship with Wellington City Council’s Events and Creative Capital team — the ArtSplash children’s festival brand identity (2024–25 cycle live, 2027 cycle in scoping) and a current brand rework for the Pasifika Festival’s Shooting Star Programme, in production through 2026.

Obvious works with Wellington City Council’s Events and Creative Capital team across two recurring festival programmes — ArtSplash and the Pasifika Festival Shooting Star Programme — anchored by Zoe Christall, WCC’s Creative Producer for Events and Creative Capital.

The ArtSplash children’s festival brand identity is the longer-standing piece — 2024–25 cycle live, 2027 cycle now in scoping. The Pasifika Festival Shooting Star Programme is the most recent — a brand rework for a programme within WCC’s wider Pasifika Festival, contracted in late 2025 and in active production through 2026.

Both pieces of work sit inside the same operating relationship — the kind of recurring civic engagement where credibility on one programme leads naturally to scope on the next.

Council festival programmes have a specific design brief

Council-run festival programmes face a recognisable design problem. They have to read as institutionally legitimate (publicly funded, culturally significant, accountable to ratepayers), but also warm and inviting (because they’re festivals — the whole point is that people show up). They have to sit cleanly inside a wider WCC brand architecture without losing their own programme identity. And they have to work across very different audience contexts: a 3-metre stage banner, a primary-school newsletter, a social square, a printed programme guide.

The two pieces of work in this case study sit at different points on that spectrum — ArtSplash as a full-scale civic children’s festival, and the Pasifika Festival Shooting Star Programme as a focused sub-brand within a larger established festival.

ArtSplash — children’s festival brand identity

ArtSplash is Wellington City Council’s children’s art festival, a programme built around schools, young artists and a curated arts experience for tamariki and families. Obvious produced the ArtSplash identity system across the 2024–25 cycle and is currently in flight on the 2027 cycle, scoping with WCC’s Creative Producer Zoe Christall.

The 2024–25 ArtSplash work included:

• Logo system across multiple colour-ways (white, blue, yellow, pink) — designed to layer onto photography, signage and printed programme guides without losing visual hierarchy
• 3D logo treatments for use across event signage and digital activations
• Children-facing creative collateral — colouring-in sheets and similar — designed so the brand becomes a creative artefact in its own right, not just an institutional marker
• Video content produced in early 2025 in collaboration with Stephen Blackburn from Pandion and Zoe Christall at WCC
• Photoshop master files and a working asset library handed off to council marketing for in-house production

The 2025 ArtSplash festival ran live across August 2025, with the brand work in active use across signage, programme guides, dance concerts and choir performances. The 2027 cycle is now in scoping — the recurring festival pattern means the brand is being designed for usage over multiple years, not a single event.

 

 

Pasifika Festival — Shooting Star Programme branding

The Pasifika Festival is one of Wellington City Council’s long-running cultural festivals, with an established parent festival brand already in place. In October 2025, WCC’s Zoe Christall and Stephen Blackburn approached Obvious about a specific piece of work: developing the brand for the Shooting Star Programme, a programme within the Pasifika Festival.

The brief is a different one from ArtSplash. Rather than designing a festival identity from a clean slate, the Shooting Star Programme work is about producing a programme-level sub-brand that sits inside the existing Pasifika Festival visual system and reads as a coherent extension of it. The work is in active production through 2026.

Obvious is reworking and extending the Pasifika Festival’s visual language for the Shooting Star Programme — building on the existing parent festival brand rather than replacing it.Wellington Pasifika Festival — Shooting Star Programme engagement, 2025–26

This kind of programme-level brand work is one of the more interesting design problems in the civic space: it requires the discipline to extend an existing brand respectfully, the strategic eye to know where the programme should differentiate from its parent, and the cultural sensitivity to do that in a context (Pasifika cultural celebration) where getting the visual language right matters.

Outcomes

What this enables for Wellington City Council

• Sub-brand discipline across two distinct programmes. ArtSplash (full festival identity) and Shooting Star (sub-brand within the Pasifika Festival) — same operating relationship, two genuinely different design problems handled coherently.
• Multi-year brand assets, not one-off events. ArtSplash designed for the 2024–25 cycle with 2027 already in scoping; Shooting Star designed as a programme-level brand inside the parent festival.
• Council-marketing handoff readiness. Photoshop master files plus a working asset library delivered so WCC marketing can run with the brand in-house without further design input.
• Cultural sensitivity in extending a parent brand respectfully. Shooting Star Programme work built on the existing Pasifika Festival visual system rather than replacing it — the discipline to extend, not overwrite.

Why civic relationships compound

The pattern this case study shows isn’t unusual for council work: one well-executed programme leads to scoping conversations on the next. ArtSplash 2024–25 led to ArtSplash 2027 scoping. ArtSplash credibility led to the Pasifika Festival Shooting Star Programme conversation. Each piece of work that lands well makes the next piece easier to win and easier to deliver.

The trade-off is that civic work demands extra discipline: every deliverable has to operate inside a wider brand architecture (WCC’s), respect existing brand equity where it exists (the parent Pasifika Festival identity), and produce assets the council marketing team can actually run with after delivery. That’s the bar, and the relationship continues because the bar gets met.

Working with a council, festival or civic programme?

Obvious builds brand systems for civic and cultural events across Aotearoa — full festival identities and the programme-level sub-brands that sit inside them. If that’s the shape of your work, we’d love to talk.