When Metro Lines Festival came to us, they had two years of good line-ups and posters nobody remembered. The brief was blunt: get commuters to buy tickets. The media was blunter: AED 250,000, almost all of it inside the stations.
Starting with the map
Every station on the festival route sits on its own stretch of track. Some are on long straight runs beside Sheikh Zayed Road, some sit on a curve, and at the interchanges the Red and Green lines cross. We traced each stretch from the network map and turned it into shapes: curves, bends and crossings, all in loud colours.
That gave us a rule. Every station’s poster is built only from the track that actually runs through it. Twelve stations, twelve posters, one system.
What we got wrong
In week two we had a beautiful set of posters that worked on a screen and failed on a platform. We printed them at full size, pasted them up in a corridor at the studio, and walked past at commuter speed with headphones in. Half of them were just pretty noise.
- We cut the line-up to three names per poster.
- We made the dates the biggest thing after the shapes.
- We moved the line, “Next stop: something good”, to the same place on every size.
If you can’t read it walking past at seven in the morning, it doesn’t work.
What happened
The festival sold 41,000 tickets, up 64% on the year before, and 38% of buyers had never been to a festival. Our favourite result isn’t a number: commuters taking selfies in front of their own station’s poster, and the festival reposting every one.
