Palm Springs Book Fest
A modular poster system for a desert literary weekend
Palm Springs Book Fest is a three-day weekend, March 27–29, 2026, at Festival Theaters in the desert. Thirty-plus authors. Friday and Saturday on tickets, Sunday open. Bestsellers, book club picks, Pulitzer winners, in conversation with journalists and literary agents.
OUTspoken produces it, with Jason Blitman as Project Director. Jason hosts Gays Reading, the podcast that brought literary conversation into the mainstream. That DNA runs through the brief: warm, irreverent, plural, audibly literary. A festival for readers who think their queerness, politics, and beach reads belong in the same conversation.
Full identity: wordmark, voice, out-of-home campaign, and a system the festival can keep using. The idea: every good book title has a double meaning, so every headline does too. Read once, get the joke. Read again, it hits harder. That second read sells the ticket.
Underneath the posters is a system. Every poster is two halves—typographic top, photographic bottom—that the festival can recombine without opening a design file.
The mark
Palm Springs Book Fest.
The wordmark is one extra-bold geometric sans set in three rows. PALM SPRINGS reads as a small label across the top. BOOK FEST claims the rest of the lockup at twice the height. The shape is heavy on purpose. It holds up at billboard scale and at avatar scale, and the round counters on the B and the O keep it feeling warm and sunny, which felt right for a festival in the desert.
The voice
Every headline reads two ways.
Every headline is a double meaning. You read it once for the sentence, then again for the joke, and the design gives both room to land.
The system
Every poster is two halves.
Every poster is built from two halves the festival owns separately. The top half is one of the wordplay headlines on a flat color field. The bottom half is a black-and-white photograph of someone reading by a Palm Springs pool with the BOOK FEST mark dropped onto the image. The two halves stack to make the full poster. They also work on their own, whichever half fits the moment better.
Same wordmark, same headlines, same photography. The variation comes from the duotone. Each pairing comes from the brand palette, which I drew from the desert through the day, from first light to the deep blue after sunset. There's no rule about which palette goes where. Whichever one looked best on the poster is the one we kept.
A single working file produces poster, half-page ad, social square, and lockscreen wallpaper without anyone redrawing anything.
The print pieces ship in CMYK with named spot replacements; the digital pieces ship in sRGB; the OOH pieces ship at the printer's preferred resolution. The whole thing fits in one folder.
The festival's marketing lead can build a new poster in five minutes by swapping a top, a bottom, and a palette.
The series
Six posters for one weekend.
Out of home
A full page in the Aspen program.
The festival placed a full page in the Aspen Film Festival program. Same audience, different season. The kind of person who books a winter vacation around a film program is the same kind who'd book a March weekend around a book program; the ad just had to put Palm Springs in front of them while they were already paying attention to a printed schedule. Same system, vertical aspect, photography turned to dusk.
In the wild
Wheat-pasted in Palm Springs.
Collaboration
With Jason Blitman, Project Director at OUTspoken and host of the Gays Reading podcast.
Jason brought the festival the audience and the voice. Gays Reading runs on warm, smart conversations between Jason and authors he admires, and Palm Springs Book Fest is the IRL version of that same generosity: a weekend of recommendations from the friend who reads more than anyone you know. The brand had to match.
I wanted to hand the festival something they could keep using as they grew, not a set of posters they'd outgrow by next year. Swap a headline, a photo, and a color, and there's a new poster in a few minutes. Long after the weekend, it still belongs to them.
Takeaways
- Palm Springs Book Fest
- Arts and Culture
- Events
- Literature
- Creative Direction
- Brand Identity
- Art Direction
- Print Production
- Brand Identity
- Editorial Design
- Out of Home
- Type System
- Jason Blitman, Project Director · OUTspoken
- Jason Blitman, Host · Gays Reading podcast
- OUTspoken
- Festival Theaters
- Hey Books!
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