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"The Wild Bride" on paper

posted by Mary Kay Hickox on Tue, Jan 3, 2012
in Our shows

By Mary Kay Hickox, graphic design fellow

Most people might not know that all of the artwork we produce is made in-house by our art director, Cheshire Isaacs, and his graphic design fellow (me!).

Creating new artwork for shows that have their premieres at Berkeley Rep is often a difficult task because we don't have much to go on except the script and interviews with the directors/playwrights. Unlike some other shows, the Wild Bride didn't have a script that we were able to read beforehand. We only had the original Grimm's fairy tale (The Handless Maiden), production photos from Kneehigh, the video, and a performance program.

What we knew that we didn't want was it to look too much like Tim Burton's style or Into the Woods (the musical). Since we knew that blues music plays a big role in this production, we wanted to emphasize that in the logo by choosing an Americana/hand-drawn style typeface. 

Here are some very early sketches of what we had in mind. When creating artwork, we need to think about the different formats it will be in -- newspapers with poor printing quality, black and white or color, advertisements that are very horizontal, vertical, small, large, web, print! Having these constraints is good sometimes, as it gives us a better idea of what we should be focusing our time on rather than going in one direction when in reality it's not a good choice.

While we could make these sketches work, they looked very dark and a little spooky (it didn't help we were creating these around Halloween). We decided to change direction, focusing directly on the logotype, instead of an image to go with the title.  

This is the first sketch of this version of the logo, hand-drawn by Cheshire, next to the finalized logo. We both liked this direction, as it captured the bluesy/Americana feel, while still keeping it wild. Luckily, everyone else liked this direction too and we went on with cleaning it up and working on each of the letters. The devil "the" was actually a happy mistake.

After we had what we liked, we scanned in the logo into Photoshop, cleaned it up, and placed it on top of one of the production photos from Kneehigh. After the logo was finalized, we created multiple versions of it to fit into different settings. Though we computer-generate almost all our artwork, it was really great to work off the computer and draw with pen and paper! We hope you enjoyed this view into graphic design at Berkeley Rep.