Fill In The Blank has been up and running for around a week now so I thought it was about time I discussed how I came about creating the image for our new theatre company. As marketing manager for FITB I have been focusing on how the company will look to our audience online and in print. Creating a brand and image that accurately represents what your company does is very important in the world of theatre. It is important that the image of the company goes hand in hand with the art that is made. As we are just starting a company, our online presence is going to be the first thing that our audience sees and this is what is going to draw them in or push them away. In this day and age, creating an online following can really help when it comes to marketing and advertising for show.
I didn’t want to jump to quickly into creating a brand until we had an idea of what we wanted our company to be. As a company, we worked on the manifesto and created what we wanted our company to become. There were three lines that stuck in my mind when thinking about our brand…
Our theatre is visual.
Our theatre is universal.
Our theatre is innovative, fast paced, defined.
During the process of brainstorming for the logo, these four bold words were at the forefront of everything. Our logo had to be visually pleasing and of a good quality. I didn’t want it to look rushed and like we just threw something together because we wanted to launch the company as soon as possible. It needed to be appealing. This brings us onto the second aspect, it needed to be universally appealing. We don’t want to alienate anyone as a possible audience member and therefore it needs to be something that will engage everyone. Being innovative to me meant being original and this meant that our logo had to stand on its own two feet and not look like something any other company could have created, it had to be all us. This encouraged us to create something that was defining and represented what we believed our company would become.
Using all this I started to brainstorm what the company would look like. Another key element was the name of the company. The use of the phrase Fill In The Blank also opened up some ideas about the concept for the branding. I thought it would be interesting to have the logo representing the name and for it to be filling in a blank.
I came up with a few different ideas and colour combinations that I thought were suitable for the companies logo:
After looking at these three samples (and discussing it with the rest of the company), I thought that the image looked nicer with the two lines of text being in different fonts. I personally preferred the last image where the font is more prominent and bold compared to the first one where the second font is more subtle. Once I had decided upon the third image it was time to start playing with different colours. I knew I wanted something that used black and white but also contained a pop of colour. After sampling a few colours we decided upon a teal blue colour which was bright and vibrant against the white and black.
We then decided to share this image with people outside of the company in the hope that we would get some feedback. Our main feedback was that the kerning of the first font was to tight and that it read ALL in the blank instead of FILL. This obviously became an issue and was rectified (with the help of a very technical piece of equipment called a space bar) so there was no more confusion. Another piece of feedback was to include the word theatre in the logo as without it, it is hard to tell what kind of company it is. The final piece of feedback was to possibly have five lines under the word blank instead of forteen. This was something I didn’t think was essential but it did improve the image when changed.
This is the final design that we agreed upon as a company…
I think it sums the company up very well and easily identifies us. I especially like that the background is white as it insinuates that there is a blank to be filled. The colour scheme of the white, black and teal is one that will be carried throughout the companies social media and possibly print. We are very happy with the logo and feel like it gives our audience an insight into our company without giving too much away.
I am excited to continue to design and expand upon the companies brand and see where it leads.
-Alice.