Austin, Texas

Moontower Comedy Festival

The world famous Moontower “Just For Laughs” Comedy Festival is a 4-day gut-busting comedy binge fest, with headliners like Seth Meyers, Howie Mandel, Leslie Jones, Samantha Bee, Maria Bamford, and so many more featured at the Paramount and State Theatres in Austin, Texas.

After bootstrapping it for over 10 years, Austin Theatre Alliance felt it was time to upgrade their main stage feature signs from foam core cut outs to something a bit more established and refined. Wanting something big and grand, a welcoming beacon that greeted the comics as they took the stage, we had a number of challenges to consider when designing and building these pieces. The first being portability. These signs needed to be quickly and easily assembled, broken down, and moved by the stage crew. This required a build that was simple and required minimal tools.  They also had to be modular, allowing for easy and cost effective updates, on the off chance “Just for Laughs” is no longer the primary sponsor. And, they needed to be stable and durable because… well because you just don’t know what a comedian might do. (Update: Just 5 weeks before the 2024 Moontower Comedy Festival, “Just for Laughs” filed for bankruptcy, leaving The Paramount scrambling to update everything. Thankfully we had planned and designed for this very instance. We were able to quickly update the panel to read “Comedy Festival” in time for opening and without the expense of replacing the entire sign.)

Unmissable at first glance, but upon closer inspection you find that these freestanding signs are incredibly detailed and dynamic. Leveraging some of the event’s posters and marketing material, we designed the “moontowers'' that make up the sign’s structure and support to give the appearance of depth while keeping the footprint and profile to a minimum. We expanded the festival's color palette of black and teal to include tints and tones, bringing  depth, dimension by using offset layers of flat aluminum letters instead of typical channel letters. This also provided durability and  reduced weight. The “Just For Laughs” and “Austin” panels are modular and can be removed to give the signs a simple streamlined look, or easily updated to feature a new sponsor or location, all without needing to bring the sign into the shop.

One of the many perks of working on such an awesome project with a great partner is seeing our work share the stage with so many talented and hilarious people. Check out the Moontower Comedy Festival, and while you’re taking a photo of your favorite comic, we doubt you’ll have any trouble capturing our good work as well.