CubaDupa
Find your wild
As a creative agency based on Cuba Street, it was the ultimate compliment to be selected as the brand partner for CubaDupa – a world-class street festival of the arts that celebrates everything we love about this iconic, imaginative Wellington precinct. Our multidisciplinary team spent months cultivating the 2024 festival branding that simultaneously transcends and celebrates the everyday. Leaning into the idea of ‘hyper-reality’ with a blend of vivid, textural illustrations, familiar landmarks and past festival photography, we paid homage to the iconic Cuba Street sightline — the city’s core of arts and culture — and reimagined it as a wild concrete-jungle meets urban-garden, bursting with life.
Vibrant festival marketing mastery
After honing the festival branding, we worked closely with the CubaDupa team to execute a range of vibrant marketing assets and engaging festival collateral – from billboards to street posters, digital advertising creative, signage and a meticulously laid-out two-day schedule that featured hundreds of performers across dozens of local venues. Dazzling colours and vivid illustrations ensured all festival marketing generated excitement, incentivised audience participation and spoke to the creative heartbeat of Pōneke. Just as importantly, eye-catching festival signage and wayfinding helped revellers seamlessly navigate each pocket of the precinct, from main stages to tucked-away alleys.
The Secret Garden
As CubaDupa’s brand partner, we had the opportunity to participate in the festival with an interactive art installation piece of our own hosted at Werk HQ. Inspired by the visionary Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Obliteration Room’, Werk presented ‘The Secret Garden’ – an interactive space where visitors were invited to leave their mark on a continually evolving canvas. Available for 48 hours only, the accumulative art piece was designed to slowly transform over the course of the CubaDupa festival weekend, slowly evolving as hundreds of contributors passed through. What began as a blank canvas gradually bloomed into a wild explosion of colour, as unpredictable as it was beautiful.
