Night Howl is a six piece festival dance band from Edmonton, Alberta, featuring cello, stand-up bass, trumpet, piano, electric guitar, percussion, and female lead vocals.
Their music is high-energy and passionate with groovy Latin and swing inspired rhythms that aim to get audiences dancing. Their lyrics are often narrative based and playfully explore themes related to relationships, partying, dark magic or mysticism, murder, and mythical creatures.
The two key features of the Night Howl visual brand strategy are sparkles and a theatrical Wiccan inspired aesthetic featuring natural objects such as skulls, crystals, and fur.
This strategy visually connects the brand to play, storytelling, escapism, nature, energy and movement, as well as narratives related to magic, creatures of the night, and wonder. These connotations contribute to a brand story that aligns with music festival culture – connecting Night Howl with its audience and ultimately getting the band booked for such events.
Campfires blazing under a night sky filled with stars was another inspiration for the visual aesthetic – a scene common to all music festivals. This idea parallels an outside stage with a full dance floor steaming with movement and energy – a scene Night Howl strives for at their live shows. The red, orange, and black colour palette draws on this imagery. Sparkles connect as well with connotations of twinkling stars and energetically dancing sparks and embers.
Sparkles are also practical and versatile. They are easily sourced and make a strong visual impact when used in stage design and costuming as well as in digital and print assets by way of photography and illustrated sparkles via pointillism.
The subject matter for this illustration pulls on themes from Night Howl lyrics and features the cello, an instrument in the band that differentiates them from other groups.
To optimise the one colour print, the illustration style focuses on linework. Details create interest and reversing out the cello portions of the illustration to have flat white negative space creates visual weight and, therefore, the focal point.
Another more subtle point of interest is that the black negative space created by the two cellos forms a whiskey bottle containing the band name — whiskey, being another lyric theme.
The main strategy centres around a digital painting of a snake. The snake itself is on-brand for Night Howl, being an animal referenced in Night Howl song lyrics and having the right “creature of the night” connotation, but it's also a theme prevalent in punk rock culture. For this reason, it marries the three brands together nicely. The snake is painted blue, a colour from the Womprat brand, and includes textural pointillism brush strokes to tie back to the Night Howl aesthetic. The high contrasting colours and novel painterly approach, helped the design cut through the competing noise.
The typeface is a style common to punk and hard-core posters and collateral. This not only appeals to the punk audience of Tavern, but creates an interesting juxtaposition between the painterly image and the punk-rock inspired typeface.
This live event sold out, keeping the venue at the maximum occupancy limit throughout the night.
This image was created by layering many photographs of the band around a fire at dusk, with manipulated transparency. The resulting image includes ghost-like figures and complex layering that reveals itself more the closer you look. This approach abstracts the band members in a way that both removes them from being explicitly featured and visually contributes to the dark themes of the album.
The fire is the focal point, featuring a long exposure photo of the sparks, which effectively turns them into photographed linework. This creates a feeling of kinetic energy and heat and is impactful even when the album image is reduced to a small digital thumbnail.
