CLEVELAND PLAY HOUSE
Black and white and orange all over
This case study will be a little different because we’re going to work backwards (trust us, it’ll make sense by the end). We just wrapped up poster artwork for Cleveland Play House’s 2025/26 season, our third year producing artwork for them. This year’s work was a bit different from last year’s, which in turn was different from our debut year working with the CPH team. And that’s because we’ve been playing a bit of a long game by slowly but deliberately developing a “house style” that CPH can own and build on moving forward. It’s been a challenging but fun exercise that’s already paying off, and that has everything to do with the open-minded and collaborative environment CPH has fostered to push things in a new direction. And I have to give huge props right off the bat to Creative Director Brian Tatsumi, who is always ready with thoughtful feedback and a willingness to try new ideas. The latest work:
services provided:
illustration
typography
Our Town
The Christine Jorgensen Show
A Christmas Story
Primary Trust
Tartuffe
Freak the Mighty
2025/26 Season
As you can see, and as you’ll be able to compare below, we leaned heavily into simplifying the artwork for the current season, agreeing on a collage approach made up of flat silhouetted shapes, high-contrast black and white photographic elements, and sketchy hand-drawn linework. The color palette was kept to a strict black and white plus orange, the brand colors for Cleveland Play House. Backgrounds were alternating solid colors. Artwork was kept isolated so that the frame of reference could change and allow different arrangements with typography. And speaking of typography, we suggested adding a new font to CPH’s existing selection of Gotham and Archer: Recent Grotesk by Process Type Foundry, to be used primarily for show titles. All of that together made for a consistent and clearly CPH-branded set of imagery for the upcoming season.
Recent Grotesk by Process Type Foundry
The artwork laid out with typography and show information in a season brochure.
2024/25 Season
Now we travel back to our second year working with CPH, a transition period for the play artwork. At this point Brian and I had already been discussing where he and the team would like to end up, design-wise, but the timing wasn’t quite right just yet. We needed a season to slowly ease things in a new direction. The established style prescribed a unique typographic treatment for each play as part of the artwork. That wasn’t going to change. But we were able to begin working with a limited color palette and a more flat illustration style. The goal was to bring more cohesion to the season artwork than the standalone approach from seasons past. I think we were somewhat successful with that goal, although the difference in title treatments still kept the plays feeling like independent islands when what we wanted was an archipelago.
Pride and Prejudice, What the Constitution Means to Me
A Christmas Story, Fat Ham
King James, Fiddler on the Roof
In addition to the regular season artwork, CPH asked if we could create a fundraising graphic for the holiday season, which would coincide with the production of A Christmas Story. The theme was “Break Ralphie’s Piggy Bank!” featuring a piggy bank (wearing bunny ears and Ralphie’s iconic glasses) that would appear more cracked as the fundraising campaign progressed.
We also worked with CPH to deliver one additional play artwork, in the event that the final show of the season would be replaced with a new play under negotiation. Unfortunately that fell through, and because it was never made public, we can’t show it here. Believe me, it was the best play poster you’ve ever seen. There has never been a better poster, people would come up to us with tears in their eyes and say, “Sir, I’ve never seen a better poster.”
Fundraising graphics for Break Ralphie’s Piggy Bank!
2023/24 Season
And now back to the beginning. When CPH approached us to work on the 2023/24 season the primary direction was to have the artwork for each play be typographically driven. The graphics would coordinate with the typography, but it would be typography (or lettering) first. We also decided to bring in a unique texture treatment for each play. The results were pretty solid, but each play’s look was very much its own thing.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Erma Bombeck: At Wit’s End
Thurgood, Amadeus
The Play That Goes Wrong, In the Heights
But the best outcome was behind the scenes. As Brian and I collaborated over the course of a couple of months, we started to see some of the technical issues that the team struggled with in producing all the various touchpoints required for production and promotion of the season artwork. Scale was one challenge: the final artwork would need to work as a tiny banner on a web page, or it might get enlarged and printed on a building-size banner. Flexibility was also key: the artwork would need to adapt to horizontal or vertical formats, sometimes with extreme limitations. We were able to talk through these concerns and deliver layered, high-resolution files that would be easy to manipulate to meet different demands.
And that began a conversation that has continued to this day. How to continue to simplify, without losing the ability to portray complex concepts? How to bring cohesion and harmony to a season while maintaining a distinct identity for each play? How to develop a graphic style that can convey levity, seriousness, playfulness, irreverence, etc.? Here’s hoping the conversation continues.
Seen enough? Questions?
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