You (or one of your friends) can be the head graphic designer for the 2014 Hollywood Fringe Festival! All you have to do is enter our design contest.

Dates of the Contest

You can start submitting your designs for the qualifying round starting Monday, March 10th. To ensure your design is eligible for the final round, make sure we receive your concept by the end of the day on Friday, March 14th. Here’s a direct link to the contest.

What We Want You to Design

Every year, we produce a printed guide of all the shows produced at our festival. This contest is centered around the GUIDE COVER IMAGE; the seminal representation of the 2014 festival.

Here are the guides from our first four years:
2013 Guide
2012 Guide
2011 Guide
2010 Guide

Generally, the cover image includes our mascots – “the freaks”. The five main freaks are included on the cover of the 2012 & 2013 Guides. The “look” of these freaks should be adapted to fit the your unique aesthetic so feel free to play into your comfort zone (see the links above for examples of previous adaptations).

The winner of this contest is immediately eligible for additional work finishing off the rest of the guide design. See below for more info.

The Big Prize

The winner of the contest will receive $799 (minus the commission taken by 99Designs) and be eligible for another $500 to finish off the guide, produce the button and complete other branding needs. Anyone can participate, they just need to create a (free) account on 99Designs.com.

We’d also adapt the images above to be used as print and online ads.

Other Info

Our team has lots of experience working with designers and we have in-house adobe suite experts, so we won’t be constantly going to you for minor updates.

We are ready to answer your questions, so feel free to communicate at will. Just email us at [email protected].

Thanks for your interest and we look forward to your submissions!

Registration is now officially open! If you’ve already created a project, you are all ready to dive into the second (and generally the most time-intensive) step of the three-step registration process. Sometimes it can be difficult to book the perfect venue, but this year you can tour a number of spaces in a condensed timeframe during the first Fringe Venue Open House of the 2014 season this Monday, February 17th. You are encouraged to RSVP by sending a quick email or message to venues you intend to visit, but if you find yourself in Hollywood on Monday at the last minute, the following venues will be open at the following times:

Lex Theatre: 2:00-6:00 PM
Three Clubs: 2:00-7:00 PM
The Complex: 3:00-6:30 PM
Theatre Asylum: 3:00-6:00 PM
Artworks Theatre & Studios: 4:00-5:30 PM (Most spaces, including 80+ seat Mainstage); 5:30-6:15 PM (All Spaces)
The Actors Company: 3:00-6:00 PM
Lounge Theatre: 3:00-6:00 PM (Note: The Lounge 2 space will be intermittently available)

JUST ADDED:
Stephanie Feury Studio Theatre: 3:00-5:00 PM

In addition, though they cannot be open on the 17th, Studio C Artists will be open the following Monday, February 24th from 12:00-6:00 PM.

Don’t miss this great opportunity to get a jump on the booking process and meet venue operators in person!

Participant Registration opens on February 1st. We’ve just announced the dates for this year’s Town Hall & Workshop series, a handful of events we’ve designed to assist you with all your Fringe endeavors.

The Town Halls are essential gatherings where we take you through all the information you need to know to produce a successful Fringe show; the Workshops are peer-led discussions with a panel of successful Fringe veterans who can tell you exactly what it’s like to be on the ground and making it count during the festival. We’ll also have informal social mixers at a local bar following each of these events. We recommend that you send a representative to each of these meetings— networking this early can be a big advantage!

• Town Hall I: Sunday, February 2nd, *12-2 PM at Hudson Theatres (Backstage Theatre)

• Workshop I: Tuesday, March 25th, 7-9 PM at Elephant Stages (Lillian Theatre)

• Town Hall II: Sunday, April 6th, 2-4 PM at Hudson Theatres (Mainstage or Backstage Theatre; TBD)

• Workshop II: Saturday, May 3rd, 2-4 PM at Theatre Asylum

• Town Hall III: Sunday, May 11th, 2-4 PM at Hudson Theatres (Mainstage or Backstage Theatre; TBD)

*PLEASE NOTE: The time for Town Hall I has been changed since our original announcement to accommodate those who wish to watch the Super Bowl!

Still have questions? Email us at [email protected].

photo by cindy marie jenkins

Thanks to everyone who attended the post-mortem Fringe Town Hall on Saturday afternoon! We had a lively discussion at the Asylum Lab. It was a very successful event for us, filled with great feedback and a number of innovative solutions for helping the Fringe better service artists and our community in the future. Special thanks to Matt Quinn for lending us the space for the meeting.

For those of you who missed it, we recorded the proceedings.

Enjoy!

Still have questions? Email us at [email protected].

Greetings, Fringers-

The 2013 Festival has come and gone. What a weird, wild and wonder-filled month it was.

The numbers we use to gauge the success of the Fringe tell a stellar tale: $258k returned to the Fringe community, 35,000 seats filled, 40% growth over 2012. And then there are the intangibles: the newfound fringeships, the cultural and artistic development, the countless feats on the stage and beyond.

And so we look to 2014 with hope, excitement and glorious anticipation of things to come. If only these qualities in their full realization powered a festival of this magnitude. Indeed our needs go beyond the full strength of our artists and the steely commitment of our staff: they require the financial support of our great community.

The Fringe is an expensive thing. Every year we are on the preverbal hook for printing, rent, insurance, advertisements, equipment, supplies and the myriad of services and goods required to serve and support this cause. As the Fringe expands year over year, so too does our overhead and we struggle to keep up.

Will you help us? Our Summer campaign is nearly done and we have a long ways to go to meet out goal. If we come up short many of our services and dreams of new outlets for promotion will be cut; every penny helps us stay afloat.

You can give to the Fringe at donate.hollywoodfringe.org.

If you truly feel the Fringe is a worthy institution then please spread the word to your friends and colleagues. The very nature of this festival is one of community and leveraging our collective strength to engender something great. Pass along this email, post on your social networks, wave the flag of fringe. We are all in this together, after all.

Your assistance is so very valuable and we love you all for helping us make this fantastic event a reality every year.

Ben