The brief
Summerburst had been Sweden's largest dance music festival for a decade before going dark for three years. When Live Nation brought it back at Ullevi in June 2022, the assignment was bigger than a relaunch. Summerburst had to land as a 10th anniversary edition, a comeback statement, and the first stadium festival many fans had been to since 2019, all at once. Live Nation's brief was direct: make it feel bigger, bolder, and more playful than any previous edition. Whatever the festival had been visually before, this one had to break out of it.
The thinking
A festival with four stages can either be one festival with four stages, or four festivals on one site. We went with four festivals.
Each stage was developed as its own sub-brand with its own visual world, its own crowd, and its own promise. Walking from the Main Stage to E.L.E. was supposed to feel like crossing a border, not changing rooms. The system had to be coherent enough that the four worlds clearly belonged to the same festival, and distinct enough that you'd notice when you'd arrived in a new one. We treated each stage as a venue inside the venue.
Main Stage
The festival's central world. An Alice in Wonderland fever dream with a cat mascot at its center, soft and surreal at first glance, sharper the longer you looked. Built to anchor the headliners (David Guetta, Marshmello, Afrojack) and feel like the heart of the festival no matter where you came from on the site.
Garden Stage
A magic garden. Lush, ornamental, overgrown, with an identity that traded festival typography for something closer to a fairytale frontispiece. The visual relief stage. Where the Main Stage shouted, Garden whispered.
Orion Area
The industrial cyberpunk corner of the festival. Orion's identity took root in a container-yard aesthetic — neon-lit metal, freight signage, glitched typography and a hard-edged sci-fi atmosphere. Built for the heaviest part of the lineup, with a visual world that felt like stepping into a near-future port at night.
E.L.E.
New for 2022. A techno stage with melting smileys as its central motif — short for Everybody Loves Everybody. Psychedelic rather than aggressive: looser, warmer, weirder, programmed for a later, deeper crowd that wanted the night to dissolve a little. E.L.E. was where Summerburst signaled that the comeback had range, not just volume.
Aftermovie and videography
Brickfield handled the official aftermovie and videography across the festival weekend, capturing the comeback in a way that matched the scale of the event.
The outcome
Summerburst's 10th anniversary edition drew 30,000 people across two days at Ullevi, with 40+ international artists including David Guetta, Marshmello, Afrojack, Alan Walker, Becky Hill, and Disclosure. The sub-brand system held up across the full site. Signage, merchandise, programming, social, and on-the-ground wayfinding all worked in the same language while making each stage feel like its own destination.
Across the comeback weekend, Summerburst stopped being a festival with stages and became four festivals you could walk between. That was the brief, delivered.