GIT 520: Prototype and Wireframe Design

Wildbloom was founded in 2019 by music promoter Pete Castellanos and former touring musician Mike Rusk, who met at Lollapalooza in 1992. They had a few beers together and talked about all of the things they'd do differently if they were in charge of their own festival.  They kept crossing paths over the years at festivals and awards shows, and after Mike's band (Tincture) broke up in 2018, he reached out to Pete with the idea that they finally put together their own festival. Pete happened to be looking for a change too, and Wildbloom was created.

Mike's long time girlfriend Trish, a photographer, would spend time every spring driving through the desert southwest trying to find the best photos of wildflowers and, really, all of the nature of the American Southwest. She suggested that they launch their festival close to home - both Mike and Pete live in LA - but have shows in the desert too. Mike thought that was a great idea and suggested to Pete that they do a spring festival series that hits each city at the best time for weather and wildflowers. They'd begin in Phoenix in early spring, then a festival in Palm Springs, then Las Vegas. Then as the desert cities got warmer, have the final two festivals in the Los Angeles and San Diego areas.

They planned to start the festival in 2021, but the pandemic in 2020 forced them to hold back and the inaugural festival ended up not happening until 2023. It featured just three of the planned cities (Phoenix, Palm Springs, and Los Angeles), with modest lineups headlined by indie favorite bands. Despite lukewarm ticket sales initially, word-of-mouth grew as attendees raved about the intimate vibe, focus on sustainability and recycling, and the incredibly well-curated artist selection. They had insisted on keeping capacities small too (under 8000 per festival) and booking acts across different genres. A breakout performance on the second day of the Phoenix festival by upcoming pop artist Sienna Reeves turned into a viral moment that ended up selling out the remaining dates of the 2023 festival and drawing a lot of attention to the festival on TikTok. 

In 2024, dates in Las Vegas & San Diego were added, completing the vision that Pete and Mike (and Trish) had for the festival. They had more demand than they expected from both vendors and musical acts, and ended up adding a second stage to the festival in Los Angeles as a trial. That went well and they continued that into 2025 with all festivals except Palm Springs having a second stage. 

In the 2025 Los Angeles festival, Mike's old band Tincture played a surprise reunion show, leaving festival-goers in awe, and their parents wishing they'd bought tickets too. The rumors around the 2026 festival lineups are wild; fueled by the surprise reunions and viral moments of past shows.

I was surprised to find out that they're hard coding everything on their website right now. They literally have no system to update their website except to give changes to a developer. They're running this in a very 2010 way, so let's get them into a modern experience.

You'll start working first on the Admin tool, where you will wireframe and prototype the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). We want to get this to development really quickly so that the Wildbloom team can start adding the events, vendors and musical acts to the admin. With the vendors and musical act information and images added, when it comes time to launch the festival attendee app, the info will be all set up in the admin tool. No admin tool and we'd have an empty attendee app!! Or worse, they'd be right where they are today, hard coding all of that information. 

For the admin tool we're looking to get to that speedy prototype quickly and so we've decided to use Material Design to reduce prototyping & development time.

The next thing on the roadmap is the festival attendee app MVP. As you might imagine, it's going to list events, and then the vendors and musical acts at each of the events. We're also going to design event ticket purchasing functionality for this. The next step of the roadmap is huge, but we have to get the basics of the project down before we can move on to other things. The exciting thing here is that they've given us full creative control over the visual, so we can design something functional and beautiful, just as long as we use their logo.

And so you know, we're not working on their website at all right now, just the admin tool and the attendee app, but we should design that admin tool with the expectation that when an event or musical act or vendor is set up, that all of the info can be used pretty much anywhere, including the attendee app or the public facing website.