Manual
San Francisco Symphony
San Francisco Symphony
San Francisco Symphony
Since its founding in 1911, SF Symphony has prided itself on its dynamic, innovative approach to music. With the unparalleled ambition of bringing music education to everyone, SF Symphony curates a diverse repertoire of performances each season while simultaneously fostering widespread musical literacy through its school programming and community engagement. By constantly pushing boundaries and celebrating top talent within the world of classical music and beyond, the SF Symphony remains one of the world’s great musical institutions.
2020 marked a monumental year for SF Symphony, as acclaimed Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas celebrated his twenty-fifth and final season. As the longest-tenured music director at any major American orchestra, his final season served as a tremendous capstone to a creative, fruitful relationship. Manual was commissioned to conceive a campaign for this pivotal 2019-2020 season, inciting us to explore ways we could visually capture the spirit of music.
The backbone of the season’s visual identity is the typeface Beatrice by Sharp Type. Having just launched when our work began with the symphony, Beatrice struck us as the perfect contemporary typographic expression. Its high contrast, idiosyncratic forms, and overall visual rhythm provided a musical quality to letterforms. We worked with Lucas Sharp to create a custom cut of Beatrice for SF Symphony that would work harder in digital contexts and in small scale use.
Our campaign centered around a single copyline, inviting you to discover that the SF Symphony is an experience that is both emotionally evocative and thought provoking. It’s an experience that engages more than just your ears. Once you go, you’ll understand.
Part of our challenge was to create a photo art direction to present Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and SF Symphony Musicians in a way that was powerful, iconic, and unified. Inspired by the silhouette image of MTT from the Symphony archive, we envisioned a series of contemporary silhouette portraits that elevated MTT’s iconic profile and his shared legacy with the orchestra. The treatment of personalities as ‘semi-hidden’ silhouettes would create intrigue.
We commissioned the photographer Mark Mahaney and art directed a series of images that provided a more revealing take on the classic silhouette portrait.
By playing with backlighting and composition, subtle lighting reveals the face of each personality. The resulting images capture the musical director and musicians in natural, engaged, emotional, immersive, and reflective poses.
To bring the photos to life in a vibrant campaign, the final images are bathed in an indigo blue – a nod to MTT’s favorite color, often visible through the conductor’s iconic blue spectacles and attire.
For screen-based communications, we proposed a set of abstract motion-based ‘musical textures’ that could be used instead of photographic imagery.
Utilizing a simple drag & drop web browser-based tool developed by Swiss creative technologist Leander Herzog, we presented a program that could easily create animated or static backgrounds. Music is then represented as a series of shifting colors and vertical bars—colorful abstractions that encompass the narrative of ‘Listen and You’ll See.’
We’re proud to have collaborated with this iconic institution and to have helped move the visual expression of the organization in a more contemporary direction.