Two brothers, a recreational park in Boom and five stages, 2005.

Tomorrowland was started by two brothers from Flanders. Pollstar, in a report by Gideon Gottfried published on 18 July 2018, named the founders as Michiel and Manu Beers and said they had gained early experience as promoters with an event called Antwerp is Burning in 2000. Wikipedia says the idea for Tomorrowland was conceived in 2004 and that the first edition was held in August 2005, organised by the brothers together with the Dutch promoter ID&T; it lists Armin van Buuren, Yves Deruyter and Coone among that year’s performers.

The idea was to move club music into daylight. The festival’s press coordinator Debby Wilmsen told Pollstar that the brothers, clubbers themselves, no longer wanted to wait until four in the morning to hear their favourite DJs, so they decided to make a festival for clubbers outdoors, in the middle of the day and in a bright and colourful setting. The report said the format had already been tried in the Netherlands, where festivals such as Mysteryland and Extrema Outdoor had been turning nightlife into daytime dancing since the 1990s.

The site has not changed. Pollstar wrote that the first edition, with five stages, was held at De Schorre, a recreational area in Boom, and that the festival still takes place there, its stages by then filling the whole park. It said the main stage sits in a natural bowl surrounded by sloping meadows, giving the site the feel of an amphitheatre, and that this was the main reason the brothers chose it. Wikipedia describes De Schorre as a provincial recreational park built around disused clay pits, administered by the province of Antwerp and lying about 16 km south of the city, which serves as a green space for local people when the festival is not on. It says the park holds art pieces made with the festival, among them the sculpture One World by Arne Quinze, the Magical Troll Forest by Thomas Dambo and a mosaic staircase called The Stairway to Unity, and that in 2023 the province and the towns of Boom and Rumst agreed to let the festival continue to use the park for the next 66 years.

A new main stage each year, built around a story.

Tomorrowland’s visual identity changes every summer through its theme. Wikipedia dates the annual themes to 2009, beginning with Masker, meaning mask, and says the main-stage design has been based on the year’s theme since then. The titles it records read like chapter headings: Zon (Sun) in 2010, The Tree of Life in 2011, The Book of Wisdom in 2012, The Arising of Life in 2013, The Secret Kingdom of Melodia in 2015 and Amicorum Spectaculum in 2017. For the fifteenth edition in 2019 the festival returned to the 2012 story as The Book of Wisdom: The Return; later themes include The Reflection of Love in 2022, Adscendo in 2023, LIFE for the twentieth anniversary in 2024 and Consciencia for 2026.

The work is done in-house. Pollstar reported in 2018 that the main stage is completely redesigned every year, and that the festival’s own creative team begins designing each year’s event in September in consultation with the production team. Materials are kept in a warehouse in a village next to Boom, beside a field of containers, and Wilmsen said the team tries to reuse things, so that items from a main stage of three years earlier might reappear on another stage. The report described a new tent introduced that year, Atmosphere, a tall teepee-style structure wrapped in printed cloth and lit with LEDs, and quoted Wilmsen: “We designed it ourselves.”

The format grew around the same park. Wikipedia says the festival ran over two days in 2007 and three in 2011, was held over two weekends for its tenth anniversary in 2014 and again from 2017, and over three weekends in 2022. When the 2020 edition could not take place during the COVID-19 pandemic, Wikipedia says the organisers produced Tomorrowland Around the World on 25 and 26 July, a virtual festival in which filmed DJ sets were composited into 3D-rendered stages in a virtual world called Pāpiliōnem, built with Unreal Engine.

A festival rebuilt around a new tale each year.

Some festivals own a single field or park; others are spread across a whole city and borrow its concert halls, theatres, churches and squares for a few weeks. The second kind cannot rely on stage architecture to carry its identity, because the buildings belong to someone else and keep their own names, signs and colours. Its identity has to travel instead: on banners hung from lamp posts, on window cards in shops and cafés, on a printed programme that visitors carry from venue to venue, and on a central box office or information point that becomes the one permanent address. The printed programme often does more of the work than any logo. It sets the order of events, the way dates and venues are written and the tone of the descriptions, and for many visitors it is the object they keep afterwards.

A single-site festival faces the opposite task. It controls every structure, so it can build its scenery from scratch each year, and many such events choose an annual theme or story that governs the main stage, the campaign artwork and the merchandise for one edition before being replaced. When a festival of this kind licenses its name to editions in other countries or seasons, the theme can be reused, adapted or rewritten for the new site, while the name and mark stay fixed. Sponsors add another layer, sometimes lending their names to stages, tents or the event itself. For designers the practical question is the same in both cases: which elements must stay constant so that the name is recognised in any setting, and which can be allowed to change with the venue, the year or the partner.

From a Belgian promoter to We Are One World, and editions abroad.

The organiser changed in 2013. Pollstar wrote in July 2018 that the brothers had started promoting Tomorrowland as part of ID&T Belgium, and that when that company was sold to SFX in 2013 they decided to continue the festival independently under a new company name, We Are One World. An earlier Pollstar report, published on 6 December 2016, said that SFX had bought out ID&T in 2013 and that Manu and Michiel Beers had eventually got their ownership of the Belgian Tomorrowland back. The 2018 report described the festival as wholly owned by the two brothers at that time, and quoted Michiel Beers saying that being fully independent had led them to the right choices in creativity and organisation. Wikipedia names We Are One World as the organiser.

The name has travelled. Wikipedia says that on 20 March 2013 ID&T Belgium and SFX announced an American spin-off, TomorrowWorld, held from 2013 to 2015 at Chattahoochee Hills in Georgia, and that its first edition reused the Book of Wisdom main-stage design from Boom. Tomorrowland Brasil was held at Itu in São Paulo state in 2015 and 2016; Pollstar reported in December 2016 the festival’s statement that it would not take place in 2017 because of external factors, and Wikipedia says it returned in 2023 at Parque Maeda. A winter edition followed in the French Alps. Pollstar reported in 2018 that the first Tomorrowland Winter was scheduled for 13–15 March 2019 in Alpe d’Huez, described by its makers as a totally new concept, with elements from Belgium and the earlier offshoots to be reused there; Wikipedia gives its theme as The Hymn of the Frozen Lotus. Wikipedia also says the festival announced an expansion into Asia in 2026, with Tomorrowland Thailand scheduled for Pattaya from 11 to 13 December 2026.

For a design guide, Tomorrowland shows how a festival can keep one name and one park while rewriting its scenery each year, treating the annual theme as a story that sets the main stage, the campaign and the editions abroad. Compare Sziget, a week-long festival on an island in Budapest, and Rock in Rio, a festival that has also staged editions beyond its home city. For this guide we use twilight violet, Schorre green and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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