And the Shambala website is actually a handy example of that layering I was talking about too …

Whilst not containing any listings specifically, there’s still a lot of content on there which has been structured in such a way that the audience can find out as much or as little as they choose.

So whatever the content – or the medium for that matter – the principle of intuitive hierarchical structuring still applies.

(Although there must be a better phrase for it than that because it really is a bit of a mouthful …)

Our audience come to our event because they love it and trust it. Of course the music is very important, but the over all atmosphere and nature of the event is more important. It also means that instead of hugely high expectations on arrival that, more often than not, are dashed, the festival goers are continually discovering new parts of the event and new bands that they had never heard of before. Shambala is much bigger than the sum of its programmed parts, and that cannot be turned into a listing!

Although visual design is important, it’s nowhere near as effective when there’s no solid structure to hang it from. ‘Walls before wallpaper’ is perhaps putting it a little too glibly but gets across the general gist …

As for the idea of sorting highlights into less conventional clusters – that’s surely got legs?! Love it!

Katie’s guidelines on structuring the content of promotional material are golden. I wish they were applied everywhere.

Of course, festival websites should lend themselves easily to this sort of approach. Shame so many seem more concerned with the visual design than with the information architecture.

I take the point about selecting “highlights” but that needn’t be on a quality basis. How about selecting by emotional range, genre, surprise factor, audience size, duration, scariness…

In this case, I don’t mean so much the branding of the festival – aside from logo, colour scheme and so on, this is fundamentally about information design.

For example, it can be a huge help to ‘layer’ content:

Firstly, there’s the top level info, giving potential audiences an overview of what’s on offer so that, as Pip says, they can make an informed but quick decision about whether this event is ‘for them’ or not.

Then, there are a number of secondary and tertiary layers of information, which make it quick ‘n’ easy for folks to ‘dig’ in order to find out more if they want to, but without getting bogged down in reams of blurb about things they’re not interested in.

This digging needs to be seamless and intuitive though – they shouldn’t know they’re doing it! Lisa mentions programming ‘clusters of similar content’, which is a rather more succinct way of putting the point!

Ideally, all information should be freely and easily available but given a kind of subliminal navigational hierarchy (ummmm, does that make sense?!), and getting the right levels of information out to people can be hugely helped by a well-designed festival programme, website or whatever medium is appropriate for the audience.

In essence: Perhaps the answer’s not to take information away from potential audiences – rather to ensure that content is structured in a way that prevents it from becoming overwhelming in the first place?

A good festival will build trust with their audience that if they come along and emmerse themselves for the weekend they will find something new that they’ll enjoy. Lisa’s right- a festival is much more than a long list of events. Your programme needs to make sense as a sum of its parts.

Run a Lucky Dip scheme where punters say what days they’re free and what venues they can get to. They then pay £20 or so and get randomly allocated tickets to 2 or 3 events.