Brand Standards | The Venue Theatre | Conifer, CO
Places, Everyone!
The Venue Theater is a nonprofit theater in Conifer, Colorado, dedicated to giving local children the best theater education possible. This isn't a place to “play theater.” This is a professional, working theater focusing exclusively on the education of elementary, middle and high school students.
Run mainly by a group of dedicated volunteers, The Venue found themselves a victim of their own success: too many students and not enough time. Finally, after a year of 90-hour work weeks, they sought help in outsourcing their graphic design needs to put more focus on directing their shows and on raising the funds necessary to run the theater.
The Venue serves a wide community broadly scattered through the Rocky Mountains. Cellphone reception is spotty and internet traffic is slow here…there are several addresses that the U.S. Postal Service refuses to deliver to because they're just too difficult to reach! So outdoor advertising is a popular and effective advertising medium — as much a part of the local culture as fresh air and evergreens.
The Venue already had a logo, and they wanted to keep an elegant stage presence. Red flocked wallpaper adorns the little lobby and old, brass light fixtures dimly light the short rows of seats. It’s a small and intimate space, under 200, with a respect for the work they do and for the kids they serve.
Rather than a total redesign, I took their current materials updated them with high-resolution graphics of rich, red stage curtains fading into black in the background. I used the logo as a guide to establish a hierarchy for typeface and color, and combined them to showcase the licensed artwork for the shows and the sponsors for the show, all local small businesses and entrepreneurs.
The Venue needed plenty of outdoor advertising, so we developed large banners and back-lit signs to hang around town. Demand for outdoor advertising space is fierce in this market, and they needed to stand out from other similar theaters. To help boost their advertising and get more community buy-in, big marquee signs were created to hang in front of the theater, and smaller 11” x17” posters to hang in the windows of hundreds of local businesses.
The theater cast and crew also receive t-shirts with the show sponsors on the back to wear several weeks before the performances to aid in promotion.
And finally, there are playbills and tickets.
After establishing the new look, I created a short brand usage standards booklet for them, and brought the new look to the front-of-house materials. The Venue’s playbills are by far the most complex piece of their collateral, and bring in the most advertising dollars. The playbills were also the most chaotic of their processes. After collaborating with their print shop, I established a new, cleaner layout for the booklets and standardized the sizes for advertising. A new internal file structure facilitated ease of file retrieval for all their advertiser’s logos and ad layouts, ensuring consistency throughout their materials.
Tickets were an unexpectedly major item, as most students had developed a habit of keeping the ticket as a souvenir to signal which plays they had a role in. Therefore the sophistication of the ticket design took on new meaning. Volunteers were also spending hours putting stickers on the tickets to show seat numbers for each individual show. A new printing vendor with variable data printing capabilities was promptly secured, and another time-consuming task was struck from the theater’s list.
