PetshopDays

About project

Petshop Days is one of the largest pet festivals in Russia, created to unite people, pets, and animal lovers through a culture of care, education, and community. What started in 2017 as an experiment on the 5th floor of a building quickly grew into a two-city festival attracting over 130,000 visitors by 2019. This isn't a cat or dog show.

It's a full festival experience: urban-scale, multi-location, built for thousands of humans and their pets navigating parks, events, activities, and experiences together.

As Art Director leading a small in-house design team from 2017–2020, I was trusted to build the creative vision and design system for the entire festival from the ground up: branding, wayfinding, spatial design, promotional materials, digital presence, and everything in between.

The Challange

The festival started as an experiment in 2017 with 4,000 visitors at a single location. By 2018, it expanded to two cities, requiring a wayfinding and signage system capable of guiding thousands of people and pets through large outdoor park spaces.

By 2019, attendance had grown to 130,000 across both cities, transforming the project from a local event into an urban-scale festival requiring a visual identity that could scale across locations, formats, and years without losing consistency.

The core challenge was designing a system flexible enough to grow with the festival while remaining clear, functional, and immediately recognisable in crowded, outdoor, high-traffic environments.

Design Solution

In 2019, we developed Petlandia: a unified brand world that positioned the festival as a fictional country with its own visual language, zones, and identity. This conceptual framework allowed the festival to expand across multiple locations and activity types while maintaining a cohesive brand experience.
The visual system was built on bold, large-scale iconography — speech bubbles, paw prints, and simplified pet heads, designed to function as wayfinding elements. Signage was legible from a distance and worked across variable outdoor lighting and crowd conditions.

The design system included:

Festival branding and visual identity
Large-format wayfinding and spatial signage
Promotional materials (posters, digital campaigns, print collateral)
On-site activations and zone branding
Merchandise and partnership materials
A proprietary newspaper format as part of the festival experience

The system was designed to support the festival's mission beyond entertainment, integrating shelters, adoption programs, and educational content into the visual framework.

Result

Petshop Days grew from 4,000 visitors in 2017 to 130,000 visitors across two cities by 2019. The Petlandia design system provided a scalable, flexible brand framework that supported the festival's rapid growth and adapted when the event shifted online in 2020 during the pandemic. The system continued to function independently after the original design team transitioned off the project.

Creative team