Wheaton Drama 21–22 Season
I’ve created the advertisements, subscription materials and show poster designs for several seasons for Wheaton Drama, a not-for-profit community theatre in the western suburbs of Chicago. I give each season its own look and feel, and carry some of those elements into the poster designs for the individual shows as well.
Each season, I try to find a unifying theme among the shows to sell the season as a whole, but this often proves to be impossible. I have built seasons around anniversary years, or other events. This season—the theatre’s comeback from COVID-19—we wanted to celebrate the theatre’s re-opening.
Like pretty much every theatre across the company, Wheaton Drama had gone dark in March 2020. We chose a lyric from Hello, Dolly! “It’s so nide to have you back where you belong,” as a sort of spirit line that would resonate with theatergoing audiences.
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—team—
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client •
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Wheaton Drama , Inc.
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marketing governor •
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Jay Pauer
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concept & design •
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Marc Ludena
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copy •
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Marc Ludena
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The first look at the new season each year is the season subscription brochure. Coordinating collateral includes:
- exterior banner
- business cards
- social banners and posts
- audition posters
Because two of the shows for the 21–22 season were rescheduled from the 19–20 season, I had the designs for Hauptmann and Peter and the Starcatcher finished prior to the shutdown. Hauptmann, in fact, was fully rehearsed and was postponed mere days prior to its originally-scheduled opening.
There was an additional challenge in creating a cohesive look for this season’s posters. We chose to use the Disney-licensed artwork rather than create our own, less-recognizable piece, but the design needed to ultimately fit in with the rest of the season’s posters.
The framing element references the season brochure, banner and other advertising, while the artwork within stands on its own.
Unfortunately, the pandemic wasn’t quite over. The production of Shakespeare In Hollywood had to be cancelled due to the COVID in the winter, so I never finished the poster for that show.
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I am currently in the middle of a complete web site overhaul. I threw this site’s most recent incarnation together pretty quickly, and before I was finished, I managed to find full-time work, and so finishing things to my satisfaction became less of a priority. Since then, I have changed my mind about how I was presenting my work on here, and so it became necessary to throw most of it away and start over. There’s still a bunch of work on here, but it’s not very focused. I’m fixing that. If you jump around the site, it might seem like some things are more finished than others. Hopefully I’ll be able to get things buttoned up in short term. A lot of the work will go away, at least for a while, while I focus on presenting fewer, but more comprehensive projects. Pardon my dust, as they say.
