toxiCountry Festival
Ideation * Design Research * Graphic Design
What happens when dusty cowboy boots meet melting type and neon venom?
toxiCountry is a fictional music festival that collides two contrasting worlds: traditional country music and the hyper-saturated, glitch-heavy aesthetic of acid graphics. The result is a bold, chaotic, and psychedelic take on country culture - amplified, distorted, and completely reimagined.
Cowboys on Acid
This project was created as part of a graphic design course during my studies in Visual Communication, with the goal of exploring cross-era visual storytelling through poster design and branded festival merch.
As part of the course, we were asked to create a poster series for a fictional music festival by mixing a musical genre from one era with a visual style from another.
I chose country music and paired it with the graphic chaos of acid graphics - a style known for warped type, fluorescent colors, and layered visual noise.
I wrote a full creative brief defining the tone, name (toxiCountry), fictional date, location, artist lineup, and event activities - setting the foundation for a strange new genre mashup.I built two distinct moodboards:
One for country music – full of dusty textures, rodeo imagery, and southern Americana.
One for acid graphics – featuring distorted type, loud colors, and experimental layouts.
The tension between the two styles became the heart of the design language.The poster series for toxiCountry was designed as a bold collision between western iconography and acid-inspired visual chaos. Using Photoshop and Illustrator, I created warped, high-contrast compositions where every object - from cowboy boots to glitchy guitars - feels like it’s caught mid-mutation.
Each poster focused on a central country symbol (boots, hat, guitar), reimagined through a distorted digital lens:
*Wireframe textures evoke synthetic space and 3D unreality.
*Hyper-saturated colors and noise overlays push the aesthetic into a visual overdose.
*Melted, metallic typography blends outlaw energy with retro-futuristic attitude.
Layouts and grids reference classic festival posters but are twisted with neon palettes, digital interference, and unexpected typographic hierarchy - creating a tension between nostalgic Americana and visual toxicity.
As part of the final presentation, I expanded the branding into festival merchandise. Each item carried the same aesthetic fusion - southern charm meets synthetic glow:
*Festival tickets
*Metallic cowboy boots
*Metallic cowboy hat
*Metallic incense sticks
The result: a full-blown identity system for a festival that never happened - but should have.
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