TryBooking Brand Guidelines: A 2007 Melbourne Start, a Ticket-Stub Mark & a Soft Slab Serif

A Melbourne start in 2007.

TryBooking is an Australian self-service ticketing platform run from Melbourne. The Australian Business Register lists TryBooking Pty Ltd as an Australian private company whose business number has been active since August 2007, with the business name TryBooking registered from April 2008. Australasian Leisure Management, writing in August 2021, said the company was established in 2008; in November 2026 its homepage spoke of “18 years powering Australian events.” The dates differ by a year depending on whether the company or the trading name is counted.

Its founders are Grant and Delma Dunoon, according to an interview with the company’s then chief executive, Jeff McAlister, in Travel Weekly in May 2017. In a second Travel Weekly interview, in August 2017, Delma Dunoon, described as co-founder, said that when TryBooking started, ticketing fees were high and there were few options, and that its mantra was to make online ticketing affordable “for everyone and for anything.” She also said the company had been doing this for ten years without changing its fees.

The business grew on community events rather than stadium tours. McAlister told Travel Weekly in 2017 that TryBooking was running 10,000 events a week. By 2021, Australasian Leisure Management reported, it operated in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom and provided software for running events, selling tickets and taking donations. In November 2026 its website named McAlister as general manager and described a team based in Melbourne.

Tools for organisers.

TryBooking sells tools to organisers rather than a consumer brand to fans. Its website lists online ticketing and registration, a box office, a scanning app, online giving and donation pages, and a developer API, and it pitches them to schools, clubs, charities, councils, theatres, dance schools, festivals and sports clubs. Its homepage runs from “school fetes to multi-day music festivals.” Its about page says it has helped more than 9,000 not-for-profits, hosted more than 75,000 charity events and sold more than 15 million tickets; those are the company’s own figures. It also makes a plain privacy pledge: “We don’t sell, share or mine your data – ever,” describing itself as the custodian, not the owner, of booking information.

Two dated product steps show how the platform has grown. In December 2017 Australasian Leisure Management reported that TryBooking had introduced self-service ticketing kiosks, running on Microsoft Windows and linked to an organiser’s TryBooking account, which let visitors buy and print their own tickets; the first organiser to use them was the Sydney Motorcycle Show at the International Convention Centre Sydney in November 2017, and printed tickets could be checked with the TryBooking Scanning App. In August 2021 the same magazine reported a User Access Management update that added Power User, Finance and Box Office roles to the existing Account Owner, Basic Access and Producer Access roles, so that finance could be kept apart from day-to-day event management, and let one login reach several TryBooking accounts.

The company also describes its payment arrangements. Card payments, its about page says, run through Stripe and Fat Zebra, so that card details do not touch its own servers; and it has partnered with ArtsPay, a payment gateway that, according to TryBooking, gives half of its profits to the arts.

Design and documentation.

Ticketing and event platforms sit between the people who put on events and the people who go to them, and their design has to serve both sides at once. Some are primary agents that sell on behalf of promoters, venues and festivals; others run resale marketplaces where fans and traders list tickets they already hold. Each kind presents itself differently, and each is worth reading on its own terms rather than as a single category.

The interface is where most of the brand lives. Event pages, seat maps, ticket wallets and checkout screens carry the name more often than any advertisement does, and the companies publish these flows in their own apps and help pages. In the United Kingdom, a 2018 court order secured by the Competition and Markets Authority required one resale site to show seat details, face value and the identity of the seller, so for resale brands some page elements are set by regulators as well as by designers.

Around the interface sit the smaller marks: app icons, short wordmarks and the photography used on event listings. Much of that photography belongs to artists, promoters and venues rather than to the platform, which means the platform’s own colours and type often act as a frame around other people’s posters, line-ups and stage shots.

Corporate pages tell a further story about owners and markets. Ticketing brands are often bought and sold, merged into larger live-entertainment groups or kept as separate names inside one company, and their about pages, trade-press announcements and regulator filings are the plainest record of who owns what, and where each name trades. The guides in this group read those records alongside each brand’s public identity; every palette shown is our own unofficial interpretation.

“Made for the moment.”

In 2026 TryBooking rebuilt its brand, and published unusually full notes on why. A company guide dated 16 September 2026 says it changed the logo, colours, lettering and photography, but not its team, platform or fees: “A rebrand is a change of clothes, not a change of business.” Its brand page, headed “Made for the moment,” quotes the internal verdicts that started the work — that the old brand felt tired, lacked cohesion and differentiation, and did not reflect the company’s values.

The new mark, the company says, is not a ticket but “the instant the ticket exists for.” Three ideas fed into it: hands framing a shot, spotlights crossing, and the perforation of a ticket stub, “the tear that says you’re in.” The wordmark is set in a soft slab serif that the company likens to a vintage playbill, and interface text in a geometric sans; the page gives the weights but not the typeface names. Instead of one brand colour it describes a palette: warm paper, a deep sage green, a blue kept for buttons and links, a dark ink for reading, and gold, coral and peony accents used sparingly. Its logo rules ask for clear space the height of the logomark and for flat colour only, with no stretching, rotating, gradients or glows.

Photography follows three rules: candid over posed, imperfection kept (“perfect is forgettable”), and natural light, whether daylight, stage light or a phone flash. Its graphic kit borrows from ticket stubs, with perforated seams between page sections and scrolling strips of invented event names such as “Pinot Pilates” and “Unhinged Book Club.”

For a design guide, TryBooking shows how a ticketing platform can build an identity around the event rather than the ticket. Compare Eventbrite, another self-service platform built for organisers, and TicketSource, another ticketing service built for event organisers. For this guide we use a deep sage, warm paper and an old gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep TryBooking’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.