Graphic Design 2.1: Professional Practice, Project 2: ‘Principles of Branding’ Exercise 1
Exercise 1: [Your Town] ONstage
A cultural arts organisation in your hometown has just secured the funding for a new annual theatre festival. The festival celebrates amateur talent and values diversity, inclusion, and breaking down barriers. The festival will be called ‘[Your Town] ONstage’, where ‘Your Town’ is the name of your place of residence – the town, city, hamlet, neighbourhood, or country – wherever you live in the world. Therefore, if you live in London, this festival would be called ‘London ONstage’ .
This year will be the first year of the annual event, as such, there is no existing brand image. Anyone attending this event will be attending for the first time, therefore the organisation needs you to design promotional materials that will communicate the brand identity. The festival will feature up-and-coming local artists and performance companies. This will include producers, directors, costume designers, and actors. The mission of the festival is to provide a platform for local talent, to help artists at the start of their careers develop their skills, and to create opportunities for anyone, regardless of age or previous experience, who is passionate about theatre.
The festival is funded by ‘Your Town’. This means that the brand identity of the town needs to be taken into consideration. Does the branding and identity of your town align with the values of the festival? Research how the town promotes itself on their website, through pamphlets and maps available to tourists, and in public spaces, for example banners or seasonal street decorations.
Depending on your specific circumstances you may find that working to extend the branding and identity of the town will add value to the festival or you may find that aligning the festival too closely with the town will have a detrimental effect. For example, if the town has been supportive of other art spaces and events in the past you can align with these events, however if the town has a reputation for discrimination or intolerance it would not be in the best interest of the festival to align with the town branding.
Based on your research you need to clearly define what the brand identity for ‘[Your Town] ONstage’ will be. What is the promise that will be made to event attendees? What can they expect from the festival? What kind of theatre will they be seeing?
Next, you need to translate the brand identity into the visual assets that will be used to promote the festival. Your town has a limited budget, so the assets will be predominantly digital.
The festival needs:
social media assets in line with the brand identity (a profile image or logo, banners, image and language guidelines to use for posting)
a showreel of some of the artists that will be performing, therefore they need animated video assets (eg. a logo that animates on screen, background graphics or transitions). Still image mockups of the frames or a simple gif animation will suffice at this point.
a digital programme for the event. They will not be printing a programme for the event to save costs, and instead will have a downloadable application that attendees can install on their devices. The app needs to communicate the brand image.
I researched further into Leicester’s cultural significance, history, local magazines, companies and events to get more of a feel of how to present ‘Leicester ON stage’. This was particularly informative when considering colour and feel of the event, having a focus on diversity, representing Leicester’s modern culture.
I experimented with various typefaces, I wanted the brand identity to be inviting, look professional and modern. Initially I felt that a playful serif typeface would work well, later testing with more minimal sans serif typefaces.
Looking back at my notes on performers I developed some icons that could be used within the app and across social media to represent the different types of performers/talks that would be going on at the event. I used simple shapes for elements representing acting, sound/talking, costume design, acting/dance.
I moved towards a logo that represented the ‘spotlighting stories’ slogan. Referring to my initial quick sketches I developed a few styles and experimented with various type faces.
I felt that the final logo design worked as it could be broken down into 3 sections and used in full where necessary. The simple triangle shape removed from the square represents the spotlight. This negative space can be used for a social media icon. The ‘LOS’ being bold in black makes it legible from distances and the ‘Leicester on stage’ section is seen from closer up.
I collated stock footage from Adobe Stock and chose a suitable audio track. This was a very fun part of the task, even though my outcome is very simple, I would like to work further on video editing as it could be a good element to add to design/brand identity guides.
I aimed for the digital programme to reflect a fun and inviting atmosphere but to also look professional and be functional within an app. The idea behind the ‘quick links’ page was to act as a contents page but be digital. I tried to add a fun layout for this page and imagined the boxes moving around slowly and bumping into each other as a fun UX idea.
I included my icons on the events programme page, which also act as buttons, to be directed to the information pages for each performer.
I began this task by noting key points, then moved onto researching. I looked into my local city Leicester, beginning with the councils website then football team’s site and other culturally significant websites.
I looked into local theatres and event spaces, including their websites and social media accounts including Curve Theatre, The Y, Sue Townsend Theatre and The Little Theatre. These companies, especially Curve included a lot of information on their members and events. I made notes of some members including directors, actors, costume designers and dancers that I found interesting, to potentially include in this ‘On Stage’ event.
I continued to research directors, producers and costume designers and came across websites such as 'Vision Artists’ a talent agency for various creative fields and ‘Theatres online’ who has a ‘backstage bible’ including all areas of people who work within the world of theatre.
I collated more visual inspiration, such as iconography of the area of Leicester. I then went onto sketching logo ideas. I wanted to develop an icon that could be worked into a logo and work as a social media icon
I developed various colour palettes inspired by colours of Leicester, blue inspired by the football team, the green tones from the nature and green areas throughout the borough and the yellows/beige/browns representing the inner city.
I moved onto creating the show reel, I hadn’t tried video editing before, this was a challenge getting to grips with even simple video editing in Premier Pro.
For my digital programme I used a canvas that was suitable for an iPhone screen, this could be translated as ‘pages’ within the brands app.
Final digital programme design:
