Musical Theatre Awards

The annual print system for Greater Austin's high school musical theatre awards

The headline piece

The brand at full strength.

The 22×34 lobby sign is the brand at full strength. The Awards mark, a fanned beam of white stripes, sits centered against a violet-to-magenta watercolor. The full lockup grounds it. ESTD 2014 anchors it. It's the same sign every year, so audience members walking in already know the program.

The standing banner

And the award goes to.

The standing banner takes the headline of the participant poster and runs it tall. It carries the same red-and-yellow duotone of cast members onstage and the same chunky AND THE AWARD GOES TO overprint, with the Awards lockup and the date slotted in below on a black footer panel. It gets reused at every step of the year's events: the regional adjudication nights, the nominee announcement, and the lobby of the awards itself.

The nomination banners

One per nominated production.

The nomination banners do the most work for the program emotionally. Every nominated production gets one (twenty-eight of them in 2016), addressed by name to the school and the show, with the specific categories called out in modular black-and-white cards across the band. Schools display them at home for weeks before the ceremony, which is how the program reaches the parents who never bought a ticket.

The certificate

Frame-ready. Name-customized.

Each winner left the ceremony with a certificate set in the same chunky display caps as the sign. The mark sits at the top, the name runs in display type below it, followed by the production and school where the work was made, with the program partners and sponsors listed at the bottom. The fanned beam mark reappears as a watermark behind the partner row to sign the piece. The print run was custom: every certificate had a name, a category, and a show.

The envelope card

The thing the host opens.

These are the cards inside the envelopes the host opens on stage. They're designed to read at arm's length under stage lights, with enough air around each line that the host doesn't fumble the name with the whole room watching. The fanned beam reappears at the bottom right, faint, as a watermark.

The lobby flyer & program ad

Celebrate!

The lobby flyer ran in the program book, the venue lobby, and inside school programs across the spring season. It sets CELEBRATE! in a hand-script display, with a documentary photograph of the cast lit from behind and the Long Center pillar callout (Celebrate · Collaborate · Captivate) running across the bottom. The black-and-white program ad was the same idea sized down for editorial spreads in school playbills and partner publications.

The t-shirt

Sondheim & Herman & Miranda & me.

The companion t-shirt names the lineage these students are training into and ends with the kid wearing the shirt. It reads SONDHEIM & HERMAN & MIRANDA & RODGERS & GERSHWIN & KANDER & HAMLISCH & ME, with ME set in outlined caps to leave a hole that the kid steps into. The shirt sells outside the venue and at every adjudication night during the season.

The pieces that get remembered are the ones that leave the building: the banner that hangs in a high school cafeteria for two weeks, the certificate the kid takes home and frames, the shirt the freshmen show up wearing the next year. Brand systems for community programs travel through the audience long after the curtain comes down.

Closing