ATET: Building a Visual World for a Floating Venue

Building a visual world for a floating venue.

Role: Lead designer. Timeline: 2021-2024. Platform: Brand Strategy, Visual Identity, Web Design, Motion, Event Campaigns, Print & Digital. Team: Jake Hughes, Laura Misuraca.

ATET is a floating open-air venue in Melbourne's Docklands, combining music, nightlife, food, and events on a barge surrounded by the city skyline. I joined the project 18 months before launch to define the brand from the ground up. After launch, I became ATET's sole designer, evolving the identity across event campaigns, motion, print, digital, and marketing for several years.

ATET needed a visual identity that felt as unconventional as the venue itself. The brief centred around an "acid daytime trip" aesthetic, combining surreal and playful visuals with the industrial setting of Melbourne's waterfront.

The venue's location was central to the concept. A floating barge surrounded by water, open sky, and the city created an opportunity to move away from the darker, more predictable visual language of nightlife. The identity needed to feel unfamiliar and playful while remaining flexible enough to work across events, artists, digital, print, and the venue itself.

Surreal: A visual world that felt unfamiliar and slightly dreamlike.

Daytime: An identity built around sunlight, open air, and sunset.

Playful: A less serious approach to nightlife with room for experimentation.

Flexible: A system that could stretch across campaigns, motion, print, digital, and the venue.

The visual direction started with the place itself. Rather than treating the Docklands location as simply a backdrop, I made its relationship with water, sky, light, and the surrounding city part of the brand language.

Early explorations leaned heavily into collage, surreal compositions, and more literal interpretations of the "acid daytime trip" concept. The final direction became softer and more atmospheric. Unexpected imagery, colour, texture, and composition created a sense of escapism without making the work feel overly complicated. The result was a visual world that felt distinctly ATET without relying on the usual visual cues of nightlife.

Sky: Open space and changing light became recurring visual references.

Water: The venue's relationship with the waterfront became part of the visual language.

Colour: Bright, atmospheric colour separated ATET from the darker aesthetics of traditional nightlife.

Surrealism: Unexpected imagery created a feeling of somewhere slightly removed from reality.

After launch, I became ATET's sole designer and was responsible for the majority of its ongoing creative output. The identity needed to work at a much higher volume than a typical brand project. Every week brought new events, artists, partnerships, and campaigns, each requiring its own visual treatment.

I built the system around recurring principles rather than rigid templates. This gave each campaign room to feel different while maintaining a recognisable connection to ATET. The work spanned event campaigns, artist artwork, motion, social, print, menus, function packs, presentations, and other marketing materials.

Weekly: Event campaigns across print and social.

Artists: Custom artwork for local and international talent.

Events: Campaigns and motion for major activations.

Venue: Menus, function packs, presentations, and marketing materials.

ATET launched with a distinctive identity built around its unusual location, daytime programming, and experimental approach to nightlife. What began as a branding project became a multi-year creative partnership. As the sole designer, I shaped the visual output across hundreds of individual touchpoints, continually adapting the identity as the venue and its programming evolved.

The strongest outcome was the flexibility of the system itself. It gave ATET a recognisable visual language without forcing every event or campaign into the same visual formula. The brand could keep changing while still feeling unmistakably ATET.