John Howrey, Design LeaderFor new work
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Summer Stock Austin

Fourteen years of poster art for the Long Center's professional summer rep season

The Bring It On poster cropped wide on the focal moment: two cheerleaders in profile facing each other in scarlet halftone with a white speech-bubble cloud separating them, vertical red star bunting on the side edges, BRING IT ON beginning to read in chunky white display caps along the lower frame.

A professional summer rep company performing three shows in repertory across one Texas summer, run by the Long Center as a teaching company that ships at equity quality. I designed the seasonal print across more than a decade. The brand stays fixed (the red corner block, the Long Center mark, the date strip, the URL); each show poster is its own composition tuned to the production. Some better than others. Below is a gallery.

The Bring It On The Musical poster: two cheerleaders in profile facing each other in scarlet halftone duotone, a small SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN red corner block at the top with a tiny acrobat silhouette over it, vertical red star bunting on both side edges, BRING IT ON: THE MUSICAL set in chunky white display caps in the lower third with the creator credits stacked underneath, run dates and McCullough Theatre venue line at the foot.
The Bat Boy The Musical poster: a distressed yellow-and-orange ground shot through with a single bloodshot eye in close-up, BAT BOY THE MUSICAL set in chunky distressed white display caps anchored low, with the red SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN corner block top-left.The Addams Family poster: a deep cobalt-blue night sky over the silhouetted Addams house, a giant moon and a hand silhouette reaching down from above, THE ADDAMS FAMILY: A NEW MUSICAL set in chunky white display caps anchored low against the moonlight.
The Oklahoma! poster: a prairie sunset photograph with a single windmill silhouette and tall grass catching the last light, OKLAHOMA! set in classic outlined slab serif display caps with 'Rogers and Hammerstein's' set in italic above, and the SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN red corner block top-left.
The 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 SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN red corner block top-left.The 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 Guys and Dolls poster: GUYS & DOLLS set as a towering hot-pink-and-yellow neon-glow wordmark stacked over the full sheet against a magenta ground, caricature gangsters and dolls illustrated along the base, the SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN red corner block bottom-left.
The Jack and the Beanstalk poster: a children's-book illustration of a curling green beanstalk with a small white cloud at the top, against an off-white field, with the SUMMER STOCK AUSTIN red corner block top-left and 'jack and the beanstalk: a children's fantasy' set in a hand-drawn brush display caps along the lower edge.The 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 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.
The 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 mid-frame. '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 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.
A 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.

Cyberstock

The pandemic season couldn't run in a theatre. Cyberstock was the alternative: a hybrid musical/film extravaganza recorded over Zoom and released as a streamed event. A series of poster explorations on a single brief: torn faces, taped headshots, handwritten provocations.

Cyberstock poster, headshot-grid variant: black-and-white passport-style portraits of the entire cast tiled into uneven rows on a white field.Cyberstock poster, handwritten variant: same headshot grid pulled to the left half of the sheet, with CYBER STOCK and 'Who are we??' set in marker handwriting across the right half.
Cyberstock poster, torn-faces collage: large black-and-white face fragments overlapping vertically across the sheet, taped together into one composite face. Title block in red anchored top-right reading 'A Teenager's Guide to Surviving A Pandemic The World' with the word Pandemic struck through.Cyberstock poster, where-are-you variant: vertical strips of torn black-and-white face photographs stacked across the right two-thirds of the sheet, with CyberStock set vertically in a black panel running down the left edge, ending with WHERE ARE YOU? in chunky display caps anchored bottom-left.Cyberstock poster, we-cannot-dream variant: horizontal black bands and rotated face fragments tiled across the sheet, with 'we cannot dream things that we haven't seen' pulled out as a single body-copy line at the focal center.
The torn-paper Cyberstock composition in progress: black-and-white face fragments cut into vertical strips, taped onto a grey woven background, the actors' eyes and mouths broken across the strips.A blank sheet of paper with WHERE ARE YOU? hand-set vertically in two stacked lines of chunky black display caps, photographed at an angle on a wood-grain surface.
A printed Cyberstock poster lying on a wood floor in yellow halftone: cast headshots arranged across the sheet.A second printed Cyberstock poster on a wood floor in scarlet halftone: same composition strategy. Two ink colors of the same poster shown side by side as production tests.

The Impact Arts rebrand

A new parent identity called Impact Arts arrived alongside a refreshed Summer Stock lockup: Musical Theatre Across Media. Three shows under the new system: Alice's Wonderland, How To Musical Theatre, In The Heights. Black-tape labels carry the credits, every line on its own slab.

The Alice's Wonderland poster: a kaleidoscopic gradient ground in coral, magenta, teal, and lime cut into prismatic triangular shards across a young actor's face in close-up, with one eye electric blue staring out through the broken pattern. ALICE'S WONDERLAND set in chunky white-on-black tape labels in the upper-left, AN ORIGINAL MUSICAL FOR ALL AGES kicker above.The How To Musical Theatre poster: a yellow ground with HOW TO MUSICAL THEATRE set in towering distressed red display caps with white outline, AN ORIGINAL MOVIE MUSICAL set in tape-label kicker above, and a behind-the-scenes photograph of four cast members posing in a park along the bottom third of the sheet.The In The Heights poster: a green-and-yellow split-portrait of two young actors mid-shout, IN THE HEIGHTS set vertically in massive black distressed display caps centered between them, THE BROADWAY SENSATION on a tape label kicker, and the Lin-Manuel Miranda / Quiara Alegria Hudes credits running in tape labels below.
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.

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