Campaign, out of home · 2026
Metro Lines Festival
Ten days of music and art in twelve working Dubai Metro stations. The people walking past every morning had never heard of it.
The challenge
Metro Lines Festival puts gigs, film and art into twelve working Dubai Metro stations for ten days every February. In its first two years it sold well to people who already go to festivals, and hardly at all to the commuters who walked through the venues every day.
The media budget was AED 250,000, almost all of it in the stations themselves. That meant the posters had to work on tired people walking fast, at seven in the morning, with headphones in.
The idea
Next stop: something good. Every station got its own poster, built from the shape of the track around it, its curves, its viaducts and the line colours that stop there, so the campaign looked like a map you already half knew. Twelve stations, twelve posters, one system, and every one a little bit different from the last stop.
What we made
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Campaign idea and line
“Next stop: something good”, plus a shape system drawn from each station’s stretch of track.
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Station posters
Twelve station posters, from light boxes on the platforms to a twelve-metre banner over the main concourse at Union.
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Platform takeovers
Floor graphics, stair risers and timetable-style line-ups at the four biggest stations.
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Social series
Six short films shot on the trains between venues, cut for vertical screens.
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Festival wayfinding
Signs, maps and wristbands that used the same shapes, so the campaign carried on inside the festival.
What happened
- tickets sold, up 64% on the year before
- 41,000
- of buyers had never been to a festival
- 38%
- design awards for the poster series
- 2
From the project
Tap any photo to see it larger.
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The first poster, BurJuman -
The twelve-metre banner, Union -
Walked past at commuter speed, week two -
All twelve posters, week three
Commuters were taking selfies with our posters at seven in the morning. That has never happened to a poster about a festival.
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