To celebrate its 75th anniversary, San Francisco Ballet partnered with MetaDesign to re-brand America’s oldest professional ballet company. The new identity marks a substantial milestone in the San Francisco Ballet’s history, while positioning the organization for the future.
As part of plans for its upcoming 75th anniversary, San Francisco Ballet approached MetaDesign to re-brand America’s oldest professional ballet company. San Francisco Ballet has enjoyed a long and rich tradition of artistic firsts since its founding, performing the first American productions of Swan Lake and Nutcracker, as well as the first 20th-century American Coppélia.
Apart from creating a new look and system that is both enduring and effective at establishing immediate brand recognition, the identity would need to serve a brand that constantly balances a program of innovative new works alongside traditional performances, without alienating different segments of its overall audience.
The new brand identity reinforces the international reputation of the ballet company under the artistic direction of Helgi Tomasson. The new design system highlights the dance company’s sophisticated, diverse international repertory and establishes ballet as an exciting and vital cultural destination. The logo combines elements from Didot, a nineteenth-century typeface, and Galaxie Polaris, a typeface that was created in 2005. The result fuses the spirit of modern choreography with the tradition of classical ballet.
MetaDesign has extended the new identity across San Francisco Ballet’s website, brochures, broad-cast and outdoor promotions seen throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
The elements of the new logo are choreographed as if on a stage: A vibrant snapshot of an energized performance. The letters are orchestrated to suggest the dynamic nature of the ballet art form, while highlighting the dramatic production lighting and shadows created onstage through the use of a sophisticated gray color palette.
MetaDesign’s inspiration for meeting this challenge came from visual research on classical and contemporary representations of dance and movement in musical notation and expressive typography. Drawing on these influences, MetaDesign created a logotype whose letters are choreographed and dynamic like dancers on a stage, elegantly enacting the kinetics of ballet.
MetaDesign extended the identity concept to a comprehensive system including brochures, advertisements, a website, street banners, and several other applications. Thorough guidelines were provided to assist the San Francisco Ballet marketing team in extending the system even further.
To commemorate San Francisco Ballet’s 75th season, MetaDesign developed an anniversary mark that complemented the company’s new identity. The mark appeared across print, online and outdoor media for the entire celebration year.
The San Francisco Ballet exists to bring the highest caliber of exuberant and inventive dance into the world. The new identity brings a freshness to the historic sense of vitality and flexibility and creates a new look and system that has impact, is lasting, and can establish brand recognition quickly.
“The new San Francisco Ballet identity takes the concept of ballet as a traditional art form and brings it to a new, contemporary place that represents the company today.”
Helgi Tomasson, Artistic Director, San Francisco Ballet