I recently completed an extensive and very fun project for The Kingston Trio's 10th Annual Fantasy Camp held each year in Scottsdale, Arizona. In 2008, the camp culminated with The Kingston Trio performing in concert, August 8th at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort, along with attendees from Fantasy Camp X.

The project was a complete redesign of past materials along with the development of a new Kingston Trio updated logo (shown right), its application as a concert logo along with concert theme line, and the design and development of a new logo for The Kingston Trio Fantasy Camp X (below), an ecommerce ticket sales website, six variations of Fantasy Camp badges, three variations of concert tickets, two variations of Fantasy Camp tickets, two poster designs, various print and web advertising, nightly program design, Camper dress shirts, three T-shirt designs, and a photo shoot of all the Campers with their Trio partners.

Once we had agreed on the logo designs and worked out the different elements of who got what badges and the quantities for each, it simply became a matter of being able to deliver a professionally produced, collector series of badges, without incurring tremendous costs usually associated with producing each of these items by hand. The reason they had to be hand produced is that each badge was personalized to the Camper, the camper's guests, the staff and their guests, the stars and their guests. To do this I created a Photoshop template that allowed me to print 4-up on a single sheet glossy paper. Because the badges were designed to be 4-color on each side, they had to be pinhole registered and then glued together. Once this was worked out, they were then laminated, trimmed and the corners were rounded.

As it always turns out in any project, there were a lot more badges needed than originally planned for. Owning the professional equipment and software to do this and having the hand skills and training to do it, was the only thing that made this approach financially possible.

The next part of the project was addressing the marketing of the actual August 8th concert. I looked at several possibilities which I cross-referenced against the demographics of who had attended the evening Fantasy Camp shows in the past and made a recommendation to use The East Valley Tribune and Arizona Republic for print. For online; azcentral, East Valley Tribune and KTAR.com along with KTAR for a unique radio promotion.

The print ads below ran three weeks prior to the actual concert using the entertainment sections and regional placement of the selected newspapers. They were also resized for web use on each of the publication websites. The web banners themselves produced a 22% click-through rate based on a limited number of purchased impressions — 49,000.

The next area of the project I created was the ecommerce ticket sales addition to The Kingston Trio website. By adding this feature, the Trio would control ticket sales thereby cutting costs associated with outsourcing this service to companies such as Ticketron or Ticketmasters. It also established the engine to allow other concert promoters to use this site for ticket sales of Kingston Trio concerts around the country producing an additional income stream to the Trio.

Once I had designed the concept and layout to the website and refined the process people would follow, I built in the added cost-savings feature to allow concert goers to print out their own tickets. After a few days of walking the client through the process and refining the size and placement of each element, the coding portion was turned over to a programmer to make the site a reality.

It took a few weeks to work out the bugs as it turned out many of The Kingston Trio fans hadn't upgraded their home computers since Intel introduced the 386 chip. Just as many were found to be using dial-up internet connections which caused a processing window to hang resulting in several people being charged twice. Refunds were immediately issued and everything worked as it was designed to. Unfortunately, the hang time was annoying to both fans who went through it and the client.

The two remaining portions of this project were the t-shirt designs and the two posters, one for the August 8th concert, the other for Fantasy Camp Campers.

To help bring in incremental income, the client asked me to design a concert t-shirt that could be sold to concert attendees and also through the Kingston Trio web store. I ended up designing three which were all produced. One was was produced for sales through the Kingston Trio website. Another was designed for the August 8th concert. And the third was made specfically for the Campers and their guests.

In designing the Fantasy camp poster, we established a time during Fantasy camp to photograph each of the Campers in their Trio groups. This photo shoot happen Thursday afternoon before their first performance. I photographed each group with and without instruments. I took those photos back to my computer and then selected the best photos, outlined each Camper, and retouched them together in two groups of ten. Once I'd composed the art I printed one poster out 16" x 34", mounted and framed it under glass.

The poster was shot, created and printed in just under 16 hours. It was delivered back to the Scottsdale Plaza Resort where Campers could see it and decide weather or not to place their order for a copy. The ordered poster were printed through an online poster printing company to keep cost within reason and make the poster affordable at extremely low quantities. We were expecting to sell no more than 30 of these, possibly one to each Camper.

The Kingston Trio concert poster was designed and printed in a quantity of 150 posters at a size of 18" x 24". It used the concert logo I had designed as the main image and included a complete list of all of the Campers who performed during the concert. Printed online and delivered along with 1000 four color, two-sided, show programs after all content had been locked in. This content was not finalized until 3 days before the beginning of Fantasy Camp, which pushed our production estimate over on delivery having to pay for 2-day vs. UPS Ground. That added an additional $65.00.

The Show Program was an interesting assignment as it covered a small tribute to John Stewart & Nick Reynolds who both passed away in 2008.

The Programs also had to list all of the Campers, additional performers and gusset stars. It also had to break each of the Fantasy Camp evening performances out and then breakout the Saturday night concert. All of these items had to be contained in one program to maintain costs and reduce the number of programs that needed to be produced for each show.

Once again, using online printing resources I was able to design and deliver this multi-use program at a considerable cost savings to the Trio while maintaining a truly professional print quality.

The final results were that we had a 90% sell-out for the Saturday, August 8th concert. The Thursday and Friday evening Camper shows were also 90% sold-out. Incremental sales were up 45% over the previous year due to the extended offering of posters and t-shirts. Website sales for concert related products increased 22%. And finally, 25 Campers had confirmed their reservations for attendance to the 2010 Fantasy Camp within two weeks of the end of the 2009, Fantasy Camp X.