SEA DOG THEATER

Service(s): Brand Identity, Social Media, Animation
Year: 2024-ongoing

All work done through Think Big Picture.

Sea Dog Theater is a non-profit theater company based in New York City that tells stories of alienation and reconciliation. They create theater about and for people on the margin of society, exploring the realms of personal, interpersonal, communal, societal, and existential alienation, and investigating the conditions necessary for reconciliation to occur.

SDT needed us to create a visual identity for their ongoing reading series. Here are few of the important goals/criteria we followed:

  • We had to make sure that the concept matched their mission and felt warm/inviting

  • The artwork all needed to be visually harmonious - each piece needed to tie into the next

  • We had to use elements of the existing branding so that it looked specific to SDT

  • Lastly, we had to emphasize flexibility and reusability so that the concept could work across titles of all shapes and sizes

The Concept

This was an interesting project because we had to design “branding” without any of the normal steps of designing a logo. I constantly tell clients and peers that “logos are not brands,” and this is a perfect example of it.

We used structural typography as our concept theme. In a 2018 article, Bethany Heck describes structural typography to be used “not only to deliver a message but to serve as the compositional foundation that a design centers around.” This sums it up better than I ever could. Essentially, we were going to use typography, specifically one letter from the title, to tell a story. Sometimes, the story would be directly related to what the show is about. Sometimes, the story would be a clever play on the title itself. Overall, the idea was to find fun ways to transform one (or a few) of the letterforms in a way that would make people say, “huh, that’s pretty cool.”