KENTUCKY AFTER DARK
BrANDING DEVELOPMENT
Client: Team Kentucky (Tourism Board)
Collaboration with Coomer
Artist: Jason Carne
As an adult, Halloween can be all year long if you want it to be.
Spiderwebs, skulls, werewolves, spiders, conspiracies, bloody (but not gory) type, UFOs and spooky houses. It doesn’t have to be terrifying to be fun and exciting. Team Kentucky and Coomer chose us to help showcase this engaging narrative. Family-friendly creative that highlights the haunted history of the Bluegrass state. Kentucky is more than whiskey distilleries and Dippin’ Dots (the entertaining ice cream is based out of Paducah, KY).
HOW THE WORK CAME TOGETHER
The world of design is a small one and often times we visit people we’ve met and worked with in the past. That’s what happened here. David Coomer, former art director at Cornett, tagged in Jason Carne, former artist at Cornett, for his love of spooky and mysterious things. Working together in the past, Coomer knew that Carne would crush the concept and would know what was expected.
Completely unbiased (yeah, right) I’d like to say that we nailed it and exceeded expectations. From a professional perspective, it was great to work with another agency to tag team this project that will go on to boost tourism in the state of Kentucky.
Kentucky After Dark is a brand new dark tourism initiative driven by the folks at Team Kentucky and Coomer.co. Hosting some of the country’s most haunted and active paranormal locations, such as Waverley Hill Sanatorium, in addition to many local legends and unexplained phenomena, the state of Kentucky wanted to bring a new type of experience to the commonwealth that lets residents and tourists alike explore Kentucky’s darker side.
I was tasked with conjuring up a wide array of assets for this project, which, as a former Kentuckian and a current horror film buff, positioned me in a unique spot to bring equal parts authenticity and passion to this project. At the onset of this project, we dug in every corner of the graveyard for inspiration - the wrought-iron gates of abandoned asylums, the ghostly lettering on antique spirit boards, but we kept coming back to the inspiration provided by vintage horror films and book titles.
The Kentucky After Dark logotype I crafted is an homage to classic slasher and zombie flicks of the 80s and a uniquely Kentuckian reference to “Return of the Living Dead” which was set in Louisville, KY. With this brand-defining graphic now written in blood, we could build on that tone into all sorts of assets, including t-shirt designs, sticker flash sheets, coasters, passports, posters, rack cards, and more.
Jason Carne | Artist
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