It’s been a very busy fall. I haven’t had much time to breathe, let alone post designs. I got to work on something last week that was different and special. I’m also on a short holiday party vacation, so I’m taking a moment.

Mike Daisey is currently monologue-ing about the side of Apple that we don’t know about. That we don’t ask about. That we might not want to know about. I count myself among Apple’s many fan girls, but this show has certainly grabbed my interest. Talk about great pull quotes. The Wozniak one is fabulous. The show is beyond acclaimed in New York, and Pittsburgh is getting one of only a handful of dates outside of the city before this returns to New York’s Public Theater in February.

It’s an important show. Designing something in the Apple vein was a thrill for me. I originally wanted to keep it very old school but after discussing it more with Mike, we decided to include the iPhone messages back and forth as so much of the show is about the current culture.

One of my favorite designs. I like this one. I will likely update this post in the coming weeks with additional supplemental advertising as we develop it.

There she is. This year’s catalog grew 8 pages from last year, a heavy-duty 48 page book, and I reduced the overall size given to even our big shows. That’s a lot more productions than last year. (Near 30, by my count.) This catalog has everything that we present and produce in the 2011-2012 season. Festivals, concerts, broadway shows, celebrations, visual art exhibits, workshops, speakers, dance, family shows, and so on, and so on, and so on. There’s an incredible feeling of accomplishment after this piece is published. As you can imagine, it’s a little like herding cats and trying to give them a bath to get everybody to tell you what it is that they’ve programmed for the season. And if they haven’t told us, it simply doesn’t exist.

They were just dropped into the mail, so patrons should be receiving them this week. And distribution throughout the district is starting now as well. Now that this one’s finished, it means I can move on to singular designs for every item in the book.

Not like that’s intimidating or anything.

Labor Day weekend is usually quiet and fun. Unless you’re preparing for four nearly sold out weeks of WICKED, starting the Wednesday after the weekend.

I’ve placed orders for almost 100,000 flyers for as many shows as I could get to before the witches descend on Pittsburgh. We’ll have a lot of district traffic, and a ton of single ticket buyers who might have such a great time at the Benedum Center that they want to know what else they can see. And with hundreds of other programs — from Broadway to concerts, to speaker series, to hands on workshops, to jazz, to family programming — chances are something will interest these patrons. We’re only hurting ourselves if we don’t get this stuff out in the racks and on tables before these patrons start coming out for one of those blockbusters that attracts crowds that are this diverse.

Our district jumbotron is my Tuesday project—I have to get commercials up for at least a handful of the Broadway shows and create a few animations for the one night-ers without any kind of electronic material. I also need to make sure these flyers got distributed as widely and completely as possible.

I wish I could have done even more, but this was a good start.

As for me, I’m really hoping that Adam & Anthony sells out on these efforts. I mean. What’s not to love about that show?

August is half over. This is the time of year when I really can’t hear myself think. Our season opens on September 7, and before that day gets here, I have three brochures that need to be finished, printed and distributed, season tickets need to be in the mail, group sales need my attention for more than a few minutes, and I’d better make sure we’ve got everything we need for the WICKED lottery.

But more importantly, the first Trust Presents show we have this year is Adam and Anthony Live. And I just did the herald for it. And my inner fan girl turned on, and now I can’t WAIT for September 22. I like this art. It’s unapproved, and I hope it doesn’t matter that it went all RENT-inspired. But a straight up treatment would have been terribly boring.

Trust Events catalog pages will be up as soon as the book goes to the printer. Until then, I’m being superstitious about publishing.

Season design is my favorite challenge, mostly because it’s the one Broadway thing I work on all year that allows me creative freedom. Well. As much creative freedom as one can have when they are trying to make 7 shows look like a complete package, staying true to all 7 brands (not to mention specials) and your own institutional branding. It took me a few years to understand it and get it, but I’ve realized that clean, neat layout is what gets you there.

The first piece is the brochure. A book with information on the shows on the season, specials and all of the information you need if you’re interested in becoming a subscriber.

It better be good. You’re asking people to spend $1000 with you, so if you don’t communicate clean or clear, they aren’t going to be convinced.

That said, subscriptions sell on product. If you have shows people want to see, they will subscribe to your season. Polishing up the product helps, though. Sometimes a lot.

This season presented a few difficulties–the photos are all Original Broadway Cast which I don’t like, particularly when there are well-known names in the pictures. (Like Nathan Lane or Kelsey Grammer.) Billy Elliot needed to be the season highlight, but it wasn’t the show that most would look at as the reason to subscribe. The majority of the shows hadn’t decided exactly what they wanted to do with their artwork on the road. Even BILLY ELLIOT was in the midst of an artwork shift.

Clean, neat lines won the day and we came up with a campaign that covered the city. We put posters in over 30 poster cases in the downtown area alone.

The artwork continues to be used for ads, additional mailings, and variations will continue throughout the year as we continue the series as shows end. We peel off the show that has passed and make 6- 5- 4- and 3-show subscriptions available.

We also need an electronic version for specific purposes: Our district jumbotrom. A buy during the Tony® Awards. Any other opportunities we have to put it out there, we’ll take. Seven shows in 30 seconds is difficult, to say the least. There’s no chance to truly feature any show, and brands start blending. The most you can hope for is grabbing a potential patron’s interest and get them to the website for more information.

I had the pleasure of working with Broadway Booking Office on materials for SOUTH PACIFIC. The McMullan artwork had been used in New York. More materials had to be produced for the tour. I began by updating collateral and ads with a rotation of quotes and changing out production shots with the New York cast to the tour cast. I also pushed the McMullan painting as far as I could, turning it into strip ads, web banners, squares and many other non-traditional sizes. I’ve also reworked the artwork further as the tour heads into another touring year with updated billing.

Party on! ROCK OF AGES was such a blast to work on. I loved the show more than I ever expected to, and was so excited that Constantine would tour with it. (He had been my favorite on Idol.) I knew that ’80s rock would resonate in Pittsburgh, so I married the design that was provided (the orange and purple clouds and stars) with production shots to get the best of both worlds. The main thrust of the tour artwork was the same as what was in New York City–A couple walking up the neck of the guitar toward LA. Adding in a little bit of the ‘wink’ from the show, showing that it doesn’t take itself all that seriously, worked well.

The tour liked the art so much that they started using it nationally after the tour cast had been photographed. As Pittsburgh was early on in the tour, we didn’t have production shots of our cast for our materials. Them’s the breaks with touring Broadway.

DREAMGIRLS splashed with dashes of the approved tour artwork but supplemented with photos of the glamour from the stage married together very well to create a shiny emarketing campaign. This show was performed over New Years Eve and Day, but we still ended the day with strong sales.

SPRING AWAKENING was a show that required an awful lot of education to prepare audiences for this incredible show. We launched an emarketing campaign to hit our full list, first with the above email about Spring Awakening. This launched a parents guide to the show that linked out from our website. We ended with the reviews eblast to the left.

This, along with the outreach coordinated through the marketing department, positioned a relatively unknown and potentially offensive show as one of the shows that patrons felt they should see, even if they weren’t prepared for the content. The production was gorgeous, and I’m glad to have had the opportunity to work so much with this material.

STOMP opened our Broadway season in 2009 so we had the summer to post images of STOMP over Pittsburgh to a non-traditional theater-going audience. The sports crowd would respond to seeing the city.