Every June, Los Angeles lights up with creativity, experimentation and community spirit as the Hollywood Fringe Festival (HFF) takes over the city. This year marks its 15th anniversary – a major milestone for LA’s largest performing arts festival. But it also marks 12 years of the festival working with 99designs by Vista.
Since 2012, the Hollywood Fringe Festival has tapped into our global community of designers to help bring their iconic event branding to life each season. From striking illustrations and typographic posters to vibrant social content and marketing materials, HFF partners with a new designer every year to evolve their look and feel. It’s a creative collaboration that reflects the very heart of Fringe: unfiltered talent, bold ideas and a global spirit.
This year’s designer, Donn Marlou Ramirez – who previously collaborated with Fringe in 2022 – brought his creative intuition, inspiration and signature visual style to curating the 2025 identity.
“Hollywood Fringe messaged me about a proposal for 2025 and shared my previous design along with a few sample concepts. They wanted something similar in spirit, and asked for a collage of the artists to be the main feature on the guide cover.”
Starting with image cleanups and background removals, Donn shared how he experimented with layouts to spotlight each artist individually. Once the core composition was in place, he added custom effects to unify the look and a hand-lettered event title for that DIY Fringe flair.
“For the sticker style, I was inspired by my water container covered in stickers. I’d been taking a break, thinking about layout, and the idea just came to me.
After several rounds of color variations and layout options, the final design direction was chosen. The guide cover now features bold, punk-inspired visuals with a palette inspired (in part) by the vibrant look of Nerds candy and quirky pet ads seen online.
“What I liked most was that I didn’t overthink it. I often get caught up trying to meet every part of a brief, but this time I leaned into my own instincts and everyday inspiration. I felt the freedom and fluidity of the whole process as if the universe had been giving me signs on what I should do next. But of course, my past experience and prior knowledge on design psychology and software helped me to create this one. I strongly believe and uphold ethical designing, we can’t just copy other designs, recycle client’s materials, or to just paste everything in a canvas.”
This year’s creative also includes t-shirt graphics, layout revisions and interactive assets – built with a deep understanding of the festival’s evolving needs and a design ethic grounded in originality and respect.
We have worked with so many artists over the years, and each one breathes new life into our annual performing arts festival. Their work becomes integral in shaping each new festival’s marketing. The talent of the artists on 99designs is incredible!
From the colorful interpretation of ‘the freaks’ in 2012 to this year’s punk, candy-inspired theme, every design reflects the moment it was created in and the community it was made for. Our designers haven’t just captured the Fringe aesthetic – they’ve helped shape it.
I like the chain from artist to organization. 99designs makes it super easy to communicate with the artist. I also love working with real artists. As an arts festival, it’s important to us to work with artists and not lean on AI.
For 12 unforgettable years, we’ve been proud to support this one-of-a-kind creative event – and even prouder of the incredible designers who’ve helped bring Fringe to life.
So, here’s to the next 15 years of bold ideas, brilliant design and Fringe magic!
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