Event Branding & Design Campaign

Curtain Up! 2015

Every September, the theatre community of Buffalo comes together to celebrate the collective opening of the theatre season with a large street party in the heart of downtown. After several successful years of design work for Shea’s, the opportunity arose for me to work on the branding for the event and I jumped at the chance! The Curtain Up! committee wanted a new identity for the upcoming event, so I was tasked with starting fresh.

 In my design I wanted to clearly represent the three major staples of Curtain Up!: theatre, the city of Buffalo, and the street party. The tragedy & comedy masks are undoubtedly the universal symbol for theatre, so I chose to use them but also make the design my own by shifting the masks and arranging the background and mask elements so they meet and intertwine in the middle.

A layered vector of downtown Buffalo was another clear choice to represent downtown, but the street party was the tough final element. After a lot of trial and error, my girlfriend gave me the idea to use fireworks. And just like that, the initial branding was complete!

The Curtain Up! campaign featured a lot of collateral pieces that stemmed from the original design, including:

  • Print, web, and playbill ads
  • Facebook & web images
  • Invitations, reply cards, and envelopes
  • Letterhead
  • Postcards
  • TV Ads
  • Programs
  • T-shirts
  • Three 7′ x 3.5′ posters featuring sponsors, branding, and participating theatre compainies.

 Each of these pieces featured the use of the central branding that was originally created for the poster, so I created 95% of the above material.

I’m immensely proud of the work that I completed for Curtain Up! and like any other high-profile project, it’s always fun to see things out on display!