Flyover is a live concert series featuring the hottest names in hip-hop. Attended by over 20k people, it is the biggest hip-hop festival in Kansas City.

Flyover was founded by Mammoth, an event production company with over 20 years of involvement in concert booking and promotions. Flyover needed a memorable and unique identity to introduce a new major festival to the Midwest. To create a fun and engaging brand, we relied heavily on illustrative storytelling. All posters feature detailed caricatures of artists being abducted by aliens and brought to Kansas City. Fun fact: A promoter let us know some of the posters had been ripped out of the walls by fans that wanted to take the artwork home with them. I later saw one of them being sold as a “rare” copy on eBay for $20. Safe to say, it was a hit.

Services Art Direction, Illustration, Web Design, Social Media Content

Process

After we came up with a story, a color palette, and a composition, I created refined outlines for the illustrations and colored them in digitally.

We took some well known symbols of Kansas such as sunflowers and cows and added them into the mix. After a lot of visual research, the caricatures came to life. Every single tattoo, outfit, and haircut was created to match the authentic style of each artist. Afterwards, they needed to be approved by each artist’s agent. In gig posters, visual hierarchy is very important, so each artist was sized and placed intentionally. We partnered with talented local illustrator Been Shill to create the pointillism blobs, soda can, and drippy mouth illustrations. All assets were applied to the event website, social media content, signage, and merch.

Cardi B

For Cardi B’s Flyover edition, we explored taking the festival’s identity into outer space.

Recognized by Forbes as one of the most influential female rappers of all time, Cardi B is known for her aggressive flow and candid lyrics, which have received critical praise and widespread media coverage. For her edition, we decided to change the color palette of the festival up a bit. Instead of the iconic sky blue, we implemented a deep navy hue contrasting with acid neons, bright turquoises, and bubblegum pinks. The main poster features the alien crashing into their planet, failing on their mission of abducting the artists, and releasing them into space instead. The caricatures were reserved for social media assets and were shared by the artists in their brand channels. This edition sold out and was attended by over 20k people.

Uniting people through live events. — Mammoth