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Summer Stock Austin

Multi-season poster art for the Long Center's professional summer rep season

The Pippin poster: a chartreuse-yellow ground with a half-portrait of a young actor's face dropped in behind, P I P P I N set in towering distressed white display caps overprinted in red across the center, with the SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN red corner block top-left, run dates JULY 25 – AUGUST 10 in a red footer panel, and the Long Center mark anchoring the bottom-right.

Summer Stock Austin is the Long Center's professional musical theatre rep season, performed in Texas heat by an ensemble cast of company adults and college-age performers running three productions in repertory across a single summer. It's a teaching company and a working theatre at the same time. Audiences buy tickets like they would for any equity production. The cast is rehearsing two other shows in the morning and evening of every performance day.

I designed the seasonal print for several years of the program. The brand stays fixed — the red SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN corner block, the Long Center mark in the footer, the date strip, the URL — and inside that frame each show poster is its own composition tuned to the production. PIPPIN goes pop-art screamed across a chartreuse ground. The Steadfast Tin Soldier goes starlit silhouette. Tortoise and Hare goes red-and-yellow Saturday-morning. The brand carries the year. The posters carry the show.

2013 season

Pippin. Swing! Bremen Town.

Three shows, three illustrated wordmarks. PIPPIN set in towering condensed display caps overprinted on a half-portrait. SWING! set in a slanted sans wordmark with the exclamation kicked. The Bremen Town Musicians set in a red brush script with the silhouetted donkey-rooster-cat-dog stack underneath. The same red corner block holds them all together.

The 2013 PIPPIN poster on chartreuse-yellow with a young actor's half-face peering up, P I P P I N set in towering condensed display caps overprinted in distressed red and white.The 2013 SWING! poster: a slanted SWING! display wordmark in red against a yellow ground, A CELEBRATION OF THE MUSIC AND DANCE OF THE 30s & 40s set in red caps underneath, with a soft-focus dancing-couple photograph filling the upper half.The 2013 Bremen Town Musicians poster: yellow ground with The Bremen Town Musicians set in a flowing red brush-script display, the silhouetted barnyard cast of donkey, cat, dog, and rooster in black-and-grey illustrations across the lower half, ADAPTATION, ORIGINAL MUSIC AND DIRECTION BY ALLEN ROBERTSON in caps below.
The 2013 season postcard: a 3-up of the season's posters tiled across the front — Pippin on the left in chartreuse, Swing! upper-right in yellow with a dancing couple, Bremen Town Musicians lower-right in yellow with the brush-script title and barnyard silhouettes.

2015 season

Tortoise & Hare. The Steadfast Tin Soldier.

The 2015 season pulled the brand into two completely different worlds. Tortoise & Hare goes loud — sun-ray ground, illustrated cast in red and yellow, the title set in a bouncing chunky condensed display. The Steadfast Tin Soldier goes quiet — deep cobalt night sky over a sunset ocean horizon, a ballerina-and-castle silhouette tower set with stars, "It's not what you're made for, it's what you're made of" pulled out as the kicker.

The 2015 Tortoise and Hare poster: red sun-ray ground, an illustrated red hare on his hind legs facing a yellow tortoise, TORTOISE & HARE set in chunky multi-color overlapping display caps anchored on a white panel below, run dates JULY 26 – AUGUST 15 in red caps.The 2015 Steadfast Tin Soldier poster: deep cobalt-blue starlit sky transitioning to a sunset ocean horizon at the bottom, a ballerina-and-castle silhouette tower rising up the center with the small silhouette of the tin soldier in the water at the base. THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER set in chunky outlined white display caps anchored low. 'It's not what you're made for, it's what you're made of' pulled out as a small italic kicker at the top.The 2016 horizontal variant of The Steadfast Tin Soldier: same silhouette composition reformatted to a tighter portrait crop with the run dates JULY 24 – AUGUST 13 set vertically along the left edge in a black panel.The Summer Stock Austin auditions flyer: THE FUTURE IS NOW set in white hand-script across the top over a stage-lit photograph of the cast in costume mid-musical-number, then 'Professional-level summer stock seasons featuring high school and college students' in red sans, audition dates and URL underneath, the SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN lockup in red on the right with ESTD 2005, and the CELEBRATE · COLLABORATE · CAPTIVATE Long Center pillar bar across the bottom.

The wordmarks

Each show is a typeface.

Every show gets its own custom display lettering — the typography is the personality. PIPPIN is a tall stencil. SWING! is a swung sans. The Bremen Town Musicians is a flowing red brush. The Steadfast Tin Soldier is a chunky outlined display with embedded shadow. The shirt is the proof — drop the photography, drop the run dates, the wordmarks alone tell you the season.

The Summer Stock Austin season t-shirt design: PIPPIN, SWING!, and The Bremen Town Musicians wordmarks rendered in solid black on a white field, lined up in a row across the chest, with the SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN corner block centered below in the parent-brand red.

Repertory theatre is three shows, six audiences, one cast, one summer. The poster art has to do half the work of communicating that. Audiences come for Pippin and stay for Bremen Town because the season feels like a season. The brand isn't the corner block. The brand is the rhythm of the posters between the corner blocks.

Closing

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