DESIGN GALLERY

CASE STUDY: THEATRICAL SEASON DESIGN

National Black Theatre

I was commissioned by National Black Theatre to design their new season theme. I found it a good example of a case study of a client-designer relationship, as they go through a gauntlet of edits inspired both by changed aesthetics as well as external and political considerations.

Each page of the presentation displayed here represents a plateau or turning point in the design, including my thoughts and choices as designer, as well as the client’s thoughts and instructions through meetings and emails.

In the end, the design was sufficient for its goal — to engage the audience and ignite their curiosity about the season offerings. It was visually cohesive and thematically on point.

However, this process points to the dissatisfaction inherent in the task of graphic design — one’s vision can never be realized, and indeed is often bastardized to an extent that one wishes elements of it were not involved at all. As an artist, it’s an interesting perspective, differing from personal creative endeavors, in the sense that there is a commercial and transactional purpose for the work. From a graphic design standpoint, any emotive quality is just an added bonus to the expectation of a sale.

Honestly speaking, it can be difficult to care about the product — either from the starting point, because you are aware that the very things you love about the design are the things most likely to be cut; or at the end, when the thing you’ve created is so divorced from your own personal aesthetic or any choices you would have preferred, that you’d rather not look at it for any longer than necessary. For those reasons and more related to perfectionism and lack of time for true creative development, it can be a grueling profession — coffee shops notwithstanding.