1448 Hollywood Logo Design
The world’s quickest theatre festival! 14 plays written, rehearsed, and performed in 48 hours! 14/48 began in Seattle in 1997. They’ve graced many venues over the years, but last year had their first-ever 14/48 Hollywood Theatre Festival in sunny Los Angeles. I've had the delight of producing theatre festivals since my years in college and when asked to come on board to lead the marketing design strategy for 14/48 Hollywood…I was *elated* at the chance to volunteer my skills to something as purposeful as accessible live theatre. However, I had something more valuable to contribute than just my design skills. My perspective. For context, our Producing Committee is composed of multiple ridiculously talented Seattle transplants who have participated in 14/48 in Seattle with so much adoration for the event they had to bring the festival to LA. I did not have the same history they each had with the festival, nothing was sacred to me. Which can be really wonderful though slightly daunting! Before redesigning the logo, I conceived the social media design strategy that laid down the foundation for our company’s brand identity. I wanted the design pathos to feel unique to Los Angeles, youthful, and community-driven. This translated to a color palette of bright red-oranges, pinks, and warm blues, colors so readily recognizable as seen in LA’s spectacular sunsets. I blended these colors together in a unique collection of mesh gradients in Adobe Illustrator. This collection became the basis for our website design and social media backgrounds. With the brightly colored backgrounds, a chunky font was necessary. While we have updated from our previous font (RIP), a chunky, geometric, sans serif to a chunky and curvy sans serif, (Poppins, thank you Google Fonts!) both fonts provided a great contrast to our brightly colored backgrounds. Now onto the logo redesign. I knew that I wanted to redesign the logo from day one. One, it would help distinguish our festival from other iterations. Two, while I do love asymmetry I don’t *feel* the original logo design is well-balanced. It also included three fonts, which (hot take) is one font too many for a logo design and makes it difficult to read. With the redesign, our logo is clear, crisp & pleasingly balanced. The light leaks and “imperfections” in the newly designed background gradient add meaning to the overall tone of the festival. 14/48 Hollywood is not about being perfect, there is no audition, it’s about finding the beauty in the imperfections of live theatre. We’re in the process of bringing on more producers to our team, some from Seattle, and others from LA and I couldn’t be more excited. Each of our team members has a different perspective and however, that perspective is shaped whether from experience or a lack of experience is extremely valuable for forging ahead.
