Why Every Festival Poster in NZ Looks the Same (and What's Actually Behind It)
There’s a certain breed of visual sameness creeping across event flyers and music festival posters in New Zealand. You know the look — slightly distorted serif fonts, a washed-out film grain, dreamy colour gradients, a smattering of stars or mushrooms. It’s like someone fed a mood board into a 2018 Tumblr filter and called it a day. We are knee-deep in the aesthetic of ‘whimsy-cool’. And worse, it's everywhere.
This isn’t a rant against one designer or studio. Quite the opposite. These posters are made by talented people. People who understand composition. Who can kern a headline like a poet edits verse. Which makes the aesthetic fatigue even more uncanny. Because this isn’t just about taste, it's about how design trends ossify when left unchallenged. It's what happens when the market rewards placid familiarity over risk. Promoters want what sold last year, so they ask for it again. Designers deliver. And the audiences? They keep scrolling, barely registering who’s playing.
Dig deeper and you’ll find the source material. Illustrator-heavy rave flyers from the '90s. The DIY visuals of zine culture. The lo-fi nostalgia of 2000s MySpace meets pre-Ableton club art. It’s all part of a visual canon now repackaged for maximum Instagram compatibility. Which is fine, if fleeting. What’s missing is the regional quirk. The down-country weird. The lo-fi Kiwi context that used to make gig posters feel like artefacts. Remember sticky A4s stapled to lamp-posts in Palmerston North, advertising a psych band with a sheep shearer for a bassist? That energy. That specificity. That’s what’s lost.
So here’s a plea. Next time a festival commissions a poster, hire someone from outside the metropole. Someone who’s more likely to use ClipArt or a sausage dog silhouette for no reason at all. Trust the fringe. Make it raw again. And maybe, just maybe, let your lineup be the most generic part of the showcase, not the art that sells it.
This isn’t a rant against one designer or studio. Quite the opposite. These posters are made by talented people. People who understand composition. Who can kern a headline like a poet edits verse. Which makes the aesthetic fatigue even more uncanny. Because this isn’t just about taste, it's about how design trends ossify when left unchallenged. It's what happens when the market rewards placid familiarity over risk. Promoters want what sold last year, so they ask for it again. Designers deliver. And the audiences? They keep scrolling, barely registering who’s playing.
Dig deeper and you’ll find the source material. Illustrator-heavy rave flyers from the '90s. The DIY visuals of zine culture. The lo-fi nostalgia of 2000s MySpace meets pre-Ableton club art. It’s all part of a visual canon now repackaged for maximum Instagram compatibility. Which is fine, if fleeting. What’s missing is the regional quirk. The down-country weird. The lo-fi Kiwi context that used to make gig posters feel like artefacts. Remember sticky A4s stapled to lamp-posts in Palmerston North, advertising a psych band with a sheep shearer for a bassist? That energy. That specificity. That’s what’s lost.
So here’s a plea. Next time a festival commissions a poster, hire someone from outside the metropole. Someone who’s more likely to use ClipArt or a sausage dog silhouette for no reason at all. Trust the fringe. Make it raw again. And maybe, just maybe, let your lineup be the most generic part of the showcase, not the art that sells it.