BRAND IDENTITY

42nd St Moon

In 2016, 42nd Street Moon was a mid-size Bay Area theater company with a challenge: how to create a brand that reflected a new vision and a new relevancy. And also, how to deal with that terrible name.

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CHALLENGING BEGINNINGS

Moon began life as a small company dedicated to presenting concert versions of “forgotten” shows — musicals from the Golden Age of Broadway that had disappeared from public memory. Unfortunately, as their production values and audiences dwindled, it was usually all too clear why they’d been forgotten in the first place.

In 2016, new Artistic Directors took the company over from its founders and set about changing its mission: Moon would shift its focus and repertoire to musicals that were either new, relevant, or made newly relevant.

I was brought aboard to take over the branding portion of the process. The idea was to start with a logo that felt structural, with great architecture and clean lines, that hinted at the Art Deco of the company’s (and Broadway’s) past, but didn’t trap the company in it.

One major problem: That name! “42nd Street Moon” is a quaint old piece of Broadway slang that was used to refer to the lights of 42nd Street. It’s a name that’s neither versatile, relevant, mellifluous, nor universal… but the name was staying…

A BRIGHT NEW DAY

Our answer was a purely typographic logo treatment using geometry as a jumping-off point. The 4 and the 2 were redrawn to connect seamlessly and to give the piece a positive, upward eyeflow. The primary logo has only one color: black. The reverse versions can use either white or a pale yellow, on top of either black or deep blue — suggestive of a night sky, which is the only reference to the moon in the logo. Like the lights of Midtown, the glow here isn’t about celestial bodies, but about theatrical signage.

Keeping the logo geometric also meant that it could adapt in many different ways to any situation at hand. 3D to evoke Hollywood studio logos? Like a lit marquee? Rainbow-filled for Pride? No problem. The structure of the logo is strong enough to keep its integrity no matter what you fill it with or how you treat it.

Additional applications

The  architecture of the logo created a visual language that we could use for subsidiary brands as well: thier education arm,a 25th Anniversary brandmark, and programming initiatives.

And, of course, the job was filled with additional assignments, especially during the Covid pandemic and shutdown, when streaming content — video and motion graphics — became more imperative than ever.

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DC Scarpelli is an artist. He understands what the client wants to say with each piece and then he makes it happen. His use of color, line, contrast, and type is endlessly inventive, and his experience, kindness, and generosity make him one of my favorite collaborators.

— Daren A.C. Carollo
    Artistic Director, 42nd Street Moon   

TAKEAWAY: It shone.

My design time with 42nd Street Moon turned out to be one of the most fruitful collaborations of my life. In addition to the total rebrand, I produced all their season key art for six years.

And it showed! Moon has gone from a theatrical anomaly to being one of San Francisco’s top destinations for musical theater, both classic and contemporary. Implementing brand guidelines across an a prominent public institution—giving it its face and shaping it for years in collaboration with its leadership’s strong vision—was immensely fulfilling.

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