Bludfest

Bludfest was Yungblud's first festival. He announced it on 18 March 2024 at a surprise gig in Camden Market, and it has been held at Milton Keynes Bowl, the venue that has hosted Queen, David Bowie, Oasis and Green Day, every year since.

The first edition was one day, Sunday 11 August 2024. The second ran over two days, 21 and 22 June 2025. The idea behind both was simple and a bit rebellious: a festival at a fair price, with tickets capped at £49.50 in year one, that cuts out the corporate side and puts the fans first. It is promoted with AEG Presents.

It was never just a line-up. Year one brought Lil Yachty, The Damned, Soft Play, Nessa Barrett, Lola Young and Jazmin Bean across two stages, plus a recreation of his favourite Camden pub, The Hawley Arms, a fairground, a tattoo parlour, a Make A Friend tent and the first shop for B.R.A.T, his clothing brand.

Yungblud was the end client. Day to day, I worked with Adam Wood and his team at Special Projects, who looked after the festival and the brand around it, with Tommas Arnby and Mike Malak in the background.

Over two years that meant two complete festival websites, one for each edition, with a new look, new content and a new launch every time, plus the online home for B.R.A.T (Beautifully Romanticised Accidentally Traumatized) and its first collection, Gobshite, designed by Dom and Jesse Jo Stark.

Time, first of all. I started the first site on 14 March 2024 and it went live on 18 March, the day Dom announced Bludfest in Camden. Tickets went on sale four days later, so it had to be ready for a very loyal, very online fanbase arriving all at once. Every year after that brings the same moments again: the announcement, pre-sale, each line-up drop and the week of the show.

Each site also had to feel like Yungblud and like that year's festival. Bludfest was pitched as the opposite of a corporate festival, so a template with a logo swapped in was never going to work. And alongside the noise, the practical information still had to be easy to find on a phone.

Both sites were built in Next.js and React, styled with Tailwind. Each year's homepage hero is that year's festival artwork taken apart into layers: clouds, crowd, buildings, flags, bats and the logo all move separately as you scroll, animated with Framer Motion. It makes the site feel like the artwork rather than a page with a poster on it.

The look changed completely between the years, but the foundations carried over, so year two could go further rather than start again. The pages are light and quick to load, which matters when a whole fanbase lands at once after an announcement. Tickets are sold through AXS and the sign-ups are embedded from Openstage, so the sites never had to handle payments or fan data themselves.

B.R.A.T sat alongside as its own Shopify store, so the clothing had a proper shop, stock and checkout without weighing down the festival site. Running on Shopify also meant the brand's fulfilment partner could manage stock, SKUs and scheduled launches directly, while I handled the design and structure of the store.

Around 30,000 people came through the gates for the first Bludfest, and the day closed with an emotional headline set from Dom. Not everything was perfect: Kerrang! and others reported long queues at the entrance in the August heat, and Dom addressed it straight away. In 2025 it came back bigger, over two days.

Bludfest has since gone abroad, with an edition in Czechia in 2026. B.R.A.T has grown into a shop, venue and fan club on Denmark Street in London.