On The Other Hand, Up The Creek 2014’s Flyer Is An Example Of Sad Design

We need to talk about Up The Creek 2014. This annual music festival is taking place at the Swellendam, some 230 kilometers from Cape Town, with an impressive lineup of some of South Africa’s finest musicians on offer. Seriously, it’s a legitimately praiseworthy lineup. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. Last week I wrote a little something about the power of good flyer design and illustration. But this week I have nothing but sadness to share about the flyers that Up The Creek is using to promote its otherwise solid lineup of South African musicians.

Seriously, just look at that image up there. It looks like an etching by the man who invented the cave painting. If event flyers are meant to communicate something about the identity of a music festival then I can only assume that Up The Creek is a festival staffed entirely by children with crayons and a passing interest in MS Paint. Now you may think that’s insulting, and to be fair you’d be right, but it’s not like I’m taking a single item of design work and extrapolating things from there to make ridiculous jokes at the expense of a festival I hate organized by an event company I dislike. For one thing, I’ve never been to Up The Creek so I can’t comment on how good or bad it is. From their website I gather it’s the usual combination of tents, nature, booze, poorly serviced toilets and whatever happens when you can combine all of those things with a young person’s nether bits. Seriously, I still don’t know how people perform cunnilingus at festivals. I also don’t know who’s organizing Up The Creek. It looks like an independent operation and that’s praiseworthy all on its own (hope they’re paying the artists). What I can do though is find more than one example of this year’s Up The Creek design aesthetic and point out how it’s something of a problem for the festival in general.

Take, for example this flyer from last year’s event:

Or the current Cover Photo from their Facebook Page:

Now while that’s a better representation of a human hand holding a pair of tickets than I could render, I have to admit it still makes me think that Up The Creek might actually be a festival run by The BFG.

This did prompt me to figure out what exactly this festival is about, and beyond bad design, I’m going to go ahead and guess they’re not too big on copywriters either. What other reason could they have for describing their festival using the following string of nonsensical words:

“It doesn’t matter whether you’re a staunch oke, a trance tripper, a hip hipster or a hip hop head.
It doesn’t even matter if you’re a zombie robot.