When the founder of Life is Beautiful approached us, he had a name, a dream, and a belief: that a festival could do more than entertain—it could create real community. The idea was bold: take 18 blocks of gritty, half-forgotten downtown Las Vegas and reimagine them as a living, breathing engine of joy. Music, food, art, ideas—interwoven into something visceral. Something unforgettable.
The moment was right. Zappos’ Tony Hsieh was actively transforming the area into a tech and culture hub. The city had momentum, but it lacked a soul-sized spark. Life is Beautiful set out to be that spark.
We were brought in before there was a team, before there were visuals, before there was even a plan. Just ambition—and urgency. What was at stake wasn’t a launch. It was a chance to anchor a new identity for a city on the edge of reinvention.
And this wasn’t just a festival brand. It was a living invitation: face your fears, chase your joy, and remember that beauty is something you make.
Market & Context
By 2012, festivals were everywhere—booming lineups, sold-out weekends, brand activations at every turn. But most followed the same formula: music in a field, fenced off from the world. Life is Beautiful broke that mold. It wasn’t just a music festival—it was a full-spectrum cultural experience: culinary exploration, immersive art, big-idea talks, and headline sets woven together into something singular.
And it didn’t happen in a park. It happened in the streets. Downtown Las Vegas—gritty, iconic, overlooked—became the venue. Eighteen city blocks. No blueprint. No precedent. Just the belief that an urban landscape, if reimagined with heart, could become a canvas for transformation.
Brand Limitations
When we stepped in, there was no brand. No logo, no visual direction, no website, no app—not even a pitch deck. Just a name and a belief that this could be something world-changing. The founder had a compelling story and a clear emotional vision, but the creative translation didn’t exist yet. That was our job.
We started from zero—building the brand, the voice, and the entire visual system from scratch. From how it looked and sounded, to how it moved and guided people through space. My background in music, branding, and digital platforms gave us a head start. But the challenge was total: invent the soul of a city-sized festival and make sure it resonated on every surface, screen, and stage.
Strategic & Technical Barriers
We weren’t building on top of anything—we were building while the ground was still being poured. There was no creative precedent, no past campaigns or archives to reference. Every visual element had to be invented. And because the brand, the website, the app, and the physical festival environment were all being developed at once, we had to think modular and move fast.
The scope was massive, but the team was lean. We were designing signage systems and CMS tools at the same time. Aligning with food curators one minute and solving for mobile UX the next. All without a single photo from a past event to show the world what we were building. The only thing more ambitious than the vision was the timeline—and we had to deliver it all on the first try.
Human & Organizational Challenges
This wasn’t a case of fixing a broken team. Quite the opposite—we were surrounded by talent. The founder was deeply involved, creatively sharp, and had a story that galvanized everyone. The early team was stacked with top performers across music, food, logistics, and tech. But the ambition outpaced the tools. SaaS wasn’t what it is today—there weren’t out-of-the-box platforms for most of what we needed.
So we took risks. We built systems from scratch, sometimes not knowing if they’d scale or even survive the weekend. We made bets on visual language, on digital infrastructure, on experience design. And somehow, it worked. Not because we knew it would—but because no one was afraid to try.
Discovery & Strategy
We were invited to pitch the creative vision for Life is Beautiful—and we won. From that moment on, alignment wasn’t a phase, it was a practice. We embedded with the founder and early team, mapping every part of the vision and pressure-testing it against the realities of Vegas. That meant time on the ground—walking the streets, absorbing the architecture, reading the energy of a city in flux.
There was no playbook, so we built one. Our discovery work wasn’t just about audience or channels—it was about tone, belief, and ambition. The question wasn’t “how do we brand a festival?” It was “how do we design a feeling that scales across 18 city blocks?”
Concept Development
The concept took shape by listening to the city. Downtown Las Vegas isn’t clean or polished—it’s layered, alive, and honest. We translated that spirit into a design system that felt hand-built and high-energy: bold shapes inspired by mid-century neon signage, gritty textures pulled from weather-worn facades, and a typographic system that moved like a shout across a crowd.
The core idea was juxtaposition. Raw meets radiant. Old Vegas bones wrapped in new light. Every element was designed to mirror the ambition of the festival itself—to show that beauty isn’t sterile or safe, it’s loud, layered, and lived-in. The brand didn’t whisper cool. It screamed possibility.
Design Execution
We designed with the belief that if the experience didn’t exist yet, the design had to make people feel like it already did.
With no footage, no photos, and no precedent, we treated every visual touchpoint as a portal—into joy, into energy, into the kind of aliveness the founder envisioned. We built a flexible visual system: a bold custom wordmark, modular iconography, high-contrast color blocks, and architectural forms lifted straight from the skyline. It was never about decoration. It was about direction.
Every asset—wristbands, billboards, apps, signs, stage scrims—was considered part of the same composition. We designed the system so it could stretch without breaking, from massive wall wraps to tiny app UI moments. Even the bathroom signage was branded. Because when someone’s inside the thing you made, everything speaks.
Build & Integration
We built the digital foundation for a festival that had never happened—so everything had to feel real before it existed. That started with the website: fast, vibrant, and clear. It set the tone not just for information, but for emotion. We partnered with a mobile development firm to engineer the app, then built internal tools and a custom CMS to feed both platforms and manage hundreds of content pieces in real time.
With creative anchored in Las Vegas and engineering in Nashville, we ran a hybrid workflow that let brand and code evolve in parallel. The secret weapon? A “pre-visualizer” tool we prototyped for internal use—an interface that let the team mock up how any content block, sign, or on-site element would look before it was printed or pushed live. It became our truth layer, our guardrail, and our sandbox all at once.
From metadata to murals, the system scaled cleanly—because we designed it to feel inevitable.
Collaboration & Workflow
We operated like a touring band—tight setlist, no wasted motion. Core creative lived in Vegas, engineering pulsed out of Nashville, and everything funneled through real-time tools: Figma for design, Slack for sync, and a shared folder system that kept print, code, and event ops speaking the same language.
There were no silos. Everyone—from poster designers to backend engineers—could see the system as it evolved. Feedback loops were fast and focused. We'd build in the morning, stress test at lunch, and ship by night. It wasn’t about process for process’s sake. It was about protecting the spirit of the work while moving at festival speed.
What made it work wasn’t just alignment—it was momentum.
The brand we built didn’t just launch a festival—it sparked a cultural landmark. Life is Beautiful became more than a weekend. It became a movement. We gave the team a system that worked in every medium, from the digital to the tactile. The signage, the app, the CMS, the visuals—they weren’t just consistent. They were alive. The brand helped set the tone for what the festival would feel like long before the first stage lit up.
By opening day, 70,000 people surged through downtown Las Vegas to experience something they’d only seen through our lens. That first year’s energy didn’t dissipate—it multiplied. The festival went on to become one of the most successful in the country, fueled by a creative foundation built to evolve and inspire.
At Metamodern, we don’t just design events—we design belief. If you're dreaming up something audacious, messy, and beautiful, we're the ones you call when it’s time to make it real.
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(2010-2025)
