Zach McKee - Life is Beautiful 2023

HOW DO YOU TURN A FESTIVAL MILESTONE INTO A STORY?
YOU LET TEN YEARS OF DOWNTOWN COLOR THE BRAND.

In 2023, Life is Beautiful hit its tenth year as a three-day, multi-stage festival in downtown Las Vegas, and “10 Years of Beautiful” became the lens for the entire experience. Instead of treating it as a logo lockup or tagline, we used the anniversary as a narrative device, pulling in the colors of downtown sunrises and sunsets and building new iconography that referenced a decade of music, art, and late nights on Fremont.

My role was to define how that story showed up visually. I set the overall direction for the anniversary look and feel, then translated it into a system that could live on screens, on streets, and across the festival footprint. A big part of the job was making loud color behave: pushing saturation for impact while still keeping everything readable on digital, in print, and under unpredictable festival lighting.

Over the season, I led design across a full spectrum of outputs, from pre-festival marketing and social campaigns to on-site signage, large-format banners, wayfinding, and branded moments throughout downtown. I partnered with internal teams and major sponsors including Amazon Music, Mercedes-Benz, Marriott, Allegiant Airlines, Dolby, JBL, Pringles, and others to make sure every touchpoint felt like it belonged to the same 10-year story, no matter where fans encountered it.