BRAND IDENTITY: BAY AREA MUSICALS
Pivoting
Branding a new venture from the bottom up is a delicious prospect. When that venture is an ambitious San Francisco theater company, it’s downright irresistible!
PART ONE: BAM!
When Bay Area Musicals’ impresario, Matthew McCoy, brought me on board to brand his upstart theater company, I was excited. Theater companies pop up with alarming frequency in San Francisco, but this one had such aspirations!
I was asked to come up with a brand identity for them. The task: start with a logo built for versatility—not evocative of any one era, but geometric and universal. Rather than have it be on trend, make it adaptable to that it can subsume any design trend that comes along.
The result was the logo to the left: geometric, energetic, vivid, and capable of being filled with any on-trend color scheme or texture (at the time, polyhedral textures were in vogue!).
With the first productions, the logo proved popular—I even began seeing it on tee shirts worn around town.
And then BAM! got the cease and desist letter.
It was with a heavy heart that I heard that the Brooklyn Academy of Music—an extremely prestigious BAM for decades upon decades—was asserting its singular rights to the name, and aggressively.
We had to change gears, fast.
PART TWO: BAY AREA MUSICALS
Out went BAM! and in came Bay Area Musicals. We kept the vivid colors and faceted look of the original logo, but changed the iconography entirely to focus on that ubiquitous San Francisco landmark, the Golden Gate bridge. Placing the bridge silhouette inside a faceted roundel sent the message that Bay Area Musicals was a San Francisco jewel.
I gave the logo three formats: one very vertical, to act as a tag for most marketing collateral, one very horizontal, for use on the website and in other space-restricted applications and one in-between: horizontal but stacked. The type was a faceted gaspipe form, which complemented the mark well, and its black frame actually stood out more confidently on all our collateral and merch.
You branded us. Marketed us. made us look completely pro. I seriously couldn’t have done any of this without you.
— Matthew McCoy, Founder & Artistic Director, Bay Area Musicals
TAKEAWAY:
LEARN AND PASS IT ON
The great shift from Bay Area Musicals’ first logo to its second was a big lesson for me: always be ready for change and learn from what’s come before. For years, I not only embraced that notion—I taught it to all my students, as well, using my experience as an example.