BSO 2023-24 Season

ART DIRECTION, BRANDING, & PRODUCTION

I had the honor of shaping the 2023-24 season identity. After being hired full-time at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, I was tasked with honing in on the organization’s institutional brand identity while also cultivating a compelling, fresh, and exciting visual identity to introduce the BSO’s new music director, Jonathon Heyward.

Serving as art director and brand manager in my first full-time design position meant that I had ample room to experiment while simultaneously pushing my skillset. Through the design process, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to fully define a flexible and comprehensive brand, and also found a new love in publication design.

Deliverables for the season included work on multiple brochures, direct mail pieces, large-scale environmental signage (on display at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall), out-of-home advertisements, digital touchpoints, and more.

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The new season branding was born out of a desire to hone in on the basics of the brand while also celebrating the artistry that our orchestra brings to the community. An important aspect of this season’s programming are the through lines that help to tell Jonathon’s story and vision for his first season as music director. Thus, as we move along in this new musical journey, you’ll see through lines being visually depicted to both reinforce this concept as well as to move the viewer through our branded materials.
This season, it was important for us to take a new, bold, and fresh approach while also remaining true to who we are and what we provide to the communities we serve. Our direction is loud and exciting, but retains a sense of elevation. We want to show the youthfulness and the ever-evolving orchestral world while also remaining familiar for our most loyal patrons. Finally, it’s important to point out that our new brand is attempting to more deeply reinforce our values to our audience. We can communicate initiatives, such as the hall for all, through words all we want, but images and graphics help to make our messages resonate much deeper.

CASE STUDY | RACK BROCHURE

Each summer, the BSO produces a rack brochure to serve as a guide to the upcoming season. This year, a wholistic institutional approach was taken to fully convey the entire experience that the organization provides to the patron.

A major success for this brochure was cultivating an iconographic system to communicate ancillary experiences that the patron has access to. The system divides these insider opportunities into free and paid categories. Each concert date in the brochure has an icon associated with it to communicate what the patron can expect when they arrive for their performance.

In addition to the immediate visual communication provided next to the concert dates, the brochure also features a pull-out last page with a convenient icon key for an additional reinforcement of the system.