Stagecoach
We redesigned Stagecoach, a popular country music festival that’s at the Coachella grounds, while also rethinking their entire site architecture under a tight 12 week timeline before their presale launch.
Redesign the site architecture and bring the web experience out of the year 2000.
The site itself was stuck in the year 2000. It was a common design trope to use wood texture backgrounds, old leather, and fonts that didn’t bring class to the extravagant music festival. We wanted to make sure the site not only felt fun and energetic but down to earth without looking dated.
We landed on a “Disco Cowboy” theme that took the gorgeous colors of the Coachella valley sunsets and placed them against the silhouettes of the cowpolk that attended.
Tools
Photoshop
Illustrator
Maze
Figma
Timeline
Overall: 12 weeks
Discovery & Research: 2 weeks
Design & Testing: 8 weeks
QA: 2 weeks
The Information Architecture
Just like Coachella, Stagecoach's website gives users specific information based on the time they're exploring it. However, if the website has too many pages and difficult navigation, important information could get lost, even though it's crucial.
After using some handy tools to crawl the site we discovered there were over 43 separate pages all being linked out from the home page. Several pages had repeated content and overlapping pieces of knowledge that could be simplified and smoothed out for a better user experience.
We took the old architecture and put each in a category to group them for convenience while also condensing content to single pages instead of spreading out as much.
We then took the pages we had and tested them by having users anonymously sort the groupings to check our findings and make sure we were on the right track.
We also made sure to cross-reference the Google Analytics behavior flow to determine where the users were dropping off when driving to certain pages. It wasn’t a perfect means to determine the exact information they were trying to find but we saw immediately better user retention on launch with the new site.
Theme Exploration
Stagecoache brings all the country music fans from across the country to is a pivotal cultural moment every year. We wanted to make sure that the designs remained grounded but pushed the limits of where design and creative were going into the year.
The moodboard for “Cowboy Disco” theme that we moved forward with
Branding Swatches
For Stagecoach, when exploring the ‘Cowboy Disco’ theme outside of just photography moodboards or illustrations, we wanted to make sure fonts and color could express the theme accurately without feeling ‘off’.
Neons and vibrant contrasting colors to emulate those neon signs outside of bars and colorful sunsets. Sprinkle a dash of 80’s disco and you’ve got a perfect country recipe for a Cowboy Disco festival.
Site and UI Design
Every piece of the site experience is meant to be a cowboy riding off into the sunset… but then there’s a bit of disco… We know that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense but if you’ve ever tried to describe the vibe of a country bar in California or Austin, Tx that’s the vibe we were going for. Cowboys with a bit of twinkle in their spurs and ready to rock.
WYSIWYG
I devised a versatile WYSIWYG content creation toolkit. This ensured that when the team at Goldenvoice was required to create blog entries or modify content on their site via their CMS, they were equipped with an efficient, ready-to-use, and beautifully integrated branding system right from the start.
Brand Guide
We also created a detailed brand guide for the festival itself. The producers of the festival would take our colors, images, and styles into consideration for large parts of the festival branding for the 2023 experience.
We had image creation guidelines that allowed for the distinct sunset colors to be carried through all content.
Graphical assets were also painstakingly created for the ops of all headers as well as guidance for lens flares and starbursts