Led design direction across Goldenvoice's festival portfolio, building design systems and digital experiences for Coachella and Stagecoach that served millions of mobile-first festivalgoers.
Goldenvoice runs both Coachella and Stagecoach out of the same venue in Indio, California. While they share infrastructure and an audience that often overlaps, the brands are distinct: Coachella is global, genre-fluid, and visually expansive. Stagecoach is country, community-driven, and unapologetically fun.
Both sites needed to serve the same lifecycle: presale hype, lineup announcements, ticket sales, and live festival weekends. Each phase had different content priorities and user intents. The existing sites treated every phase the same and neither had a design system that could flex across the full season.
The goal: build design systems and digital experiences for both festivals that could adapt across the full lifecycle without requiring a redesign at each phase.
I led digital design across both festivals. For Coachella, that meant owning the visual direction, building the design system from scratch, and designing key pages across mobile and desktop. For Stagecoach, I directed the brand revitalization, rebuilt the information architecture from the ground up, and established the "Disco Cowboy" creative direction that carried through to physical activations.
Across both properties, the core of the work was systems thinking: building token-based palettes, flexible typography scales, and component libraries that could support wildly different content states without breaking. Every decision about a gradient, an icon, or a navigation pattern needed to hold up across the full lifecycle of each festival.
The Coachella design system was built around a single idea: the feeling of laying in the grass at golden hour and looking up at the sky. That moment became the organizing metaphor for every visual decision. The gradient palette transitions from warm desert greens through ocean blues to open sky. Buttons reference the floating balloon chains that arc across the festival grounds. Typography flows between structured navigation type and expressive editorial headlines.
The system shipped as a token-based palette with named color roles (backgrounds, gradients, neutrals, accents), a custom icon set for festival amenities and wayfinding, and a component library that scaled across four distinct content phases without visual drift.
Stagecoach's existing site had wood texture backgrounds, old leather, and typography that didn't match the energy of the festival. The creative direction needed to feel fun and energetic but grounded without looking dated.
The answer was "Disco Cowboy": Coachella Valley sunset colors against cowfolk silhouettes, neon and vibrant contrasting colors evoking bar signage and 80s disco energy. The brand guide adapted colors and styles based on visitor experience timing (morning, noon, golden hour) and served as the reference for the 2023 festival branding across physical activations.
The design systems built for Coachella and Stagecoach gave Goldenvoice a repeatable creative infrastructure that scaled across both festivals without sacrificing the distinct identity of each brand. Phase-adaptive content meant both sites served four distinct experiences (presale, sales, lineup, live) from a single system per festival.
The Stagecoach brand guide extended beyond digital into physical activations, signage, and merchandise for the 2023 festival. Analytics-driven navigation restructuring, validated by user card sorts, ensured high-traffic paths like ticket purchasing and lineup browsing were immediately accessible. The token-based color architecture made seasonal and event-specific updates a configuration change instead of a redesign.