Gov Ball gets a classic NYC identity, with a logo inspired by Milton Glaser’s I ❤ NY

Creative studio Burn & Broad has crafted the brand identity and visual language for the famous three-day Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City – a project that the NYC-based agency hails as an “honour”. For the visuals, Burn & Broad has leaned into classic NYC iconography while planning to celebrate the city’s “loud, colourful, and unpredictable nature”.

“We wanted to re-imagine the festival as our sort of wild and distorted Disney World – the loudest place on earth in the loudest city on earth,” Burn & Broad creative directors, Eugene Serebrennikov and Vicente Garcia Morillo tell It’s Nice That. “Instead of a storybook castle with overly friendly mascots, we created an NY-inspired world where bodega cats and headphone-wearing pigeons help us navigate the concrete jungle. Creating these characters allowed us to deepen our story-telling.”

Inspired by how Milton Glaser’s timeless I ︎❤ NY symbol “conveyed a love for the city for what it is – flaws and all”, Burn & Broad hopes to capture the same emotion with a new Gov Ball logo: a “perfectly imperfect” Big Apple. A fresh colour palette continues the narrative; bright greens represent the “concrete jungle”, yellows suggest a flow of taxis throughout the streets, while red nods once more to the Big Apple concept.

The festival’s poster, “without a doubt the nucleus of a music festival identity”, states Eugene, presented one of the main challenges for the studio. While ongoing line-up changes kept the studio “on its toes”, a focal point for Burn & Broad was to craft a system that was easy to adapt at a moment’s notice.

The Governors Ball Festival will run from 10 June-12 June; Burn & Broad’s design work features across the festival’s website, posters, countdown and throughout branding.