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I’ll Be Your Mirror.

Posted on October 12, 2007
Filed Under Events, All about (ahem) us, Curious Frog | Leave a Comment

Thanks to the rather determined prodding of a friend over a decade ago, I’ve been an avid theatergoer. Even though I harbored an interest in set design in college, perhaps my early experience with musicals (Showboat, my first Broadway production experience) soured me for a while. But after Moon for the Misbegotten (with Gabriel Bryne and Cherry Jones) and True West, I was fairly hooked. My first subscription was to the New York Theater Workshop, in order to see Caryl Churchill’s Far Away (who has two plays this coming season — the MTC is mounting the first Broadway production of Top Girls and the Public is featuring the premier of Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?).

Since them, it’s been mostly a solo experience. I’m constantly confounded by friends who can’t see the value in attending, but still spend $80 on $15 worth of liquor in a bar. Last year, a cousin whom I had never met moved to town, who also happened to have a MFA in Theater. This welcome surprise means I’ve seen more productions than ever. Newcomers also have a little more energy to organize (or, you know, theatre people are required to have boundless optimism), so it was even more of a surprise when Renee (Rodriguez) invited me to be a board member of a company she was forming.

Surely, being a board member is more thanklessness than honorific, but the timing was about perfect. I would prefer to more than simply a consumer of the arts (my work with Jen Bekman has often been very hands-on: helping with installations, moving art and the like), and even as the process had proven to be as varied as I expect (start a non profit and mount a production simultaneously), the simplicity of the idea was more than appealing.

The overall identity is still simmering, so I’ve save the story of that for later. The name, ‘The Curious Frog Theatre Company‘ is inspired by identity and our mission. Though Renee is from the Croat half of my family, her father is Puerto Rican. Our mission is to present both ‘classical’ and emerging works in a non-traditional manner. In more blunt terms, it is about addressing the issues and expectation inherent in casting. Rather than take dogmatic approach and simply invert expectations, we are seeking to make the process integration to play selection and production. Attaching ‘curious’, with the dual reading of both inquisitive and novelty to the informal symbol of Puetro Rico, and we had a name.

Our first production, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors — his first play — was symbolically very apt: an initial foray that deals directly with issue of identity confusion. Since we are very much upstarts, economy is key. And though our aspirations extend well beyond the notion of ‘community’ theater, we don’t want to be alienated from the issues and realities of the communities our innovative approach to casting can both draw from and comment on. So productions are in parks in areas of the city that have historic associations with Latino communities.

So, how to visualize all this? As a designer with a strong aversion to anything ‘cutesy’ I struggled to developed something concise and compelling, all the while knowing I was willfully ignorant with every iteration of typographic error or play on twinning ever imagined.

The typesetting is a little obvious, by that standard. Flop the R and voila, erroneous! I did it initially with the hopes of transforming the ‘Rs’ into faces, perhaps inverting emotions — a play on the masks normally used to signify theatre. I didn’t have the time to invest in illustration, so I went cheap: stock art. Finessing stock art can be tricky, because while there is lots of it, there is lots of it that is bad.

Keeping with the twins theme, and allowing that the play itself requires little to no explication (it Shakespeare! …and you’re done), I focused on effective communication (read: attention-getting). I wanted fun with a little edge. Some very cute babies, with a little color and repetition to make it, well, yes, a little creepy. Since we are doing the productions in the park, I added some grass to leaven the creepiness. Tie it all together with a dominant visual for the logo and you have a postcard. And some good opportunities for swag. We will be offering tee shirts, mugs and the like very shortly (sorting out all that non-profit ticky tacky).

And it’s not too late to see a show. Tomorrow at Astoria Park, underneath the absolutely stunning Hell Gate Bridge (just south, near the water’s edge), or Sunday at Fort Tryon (which I hear is lovely as well, though I haven’t been). The show is fun, and funny — an excellent introduction into Shakespeare that doesn’t require four hours, or a concordance.

Priceless.

Posted on September 21, 2007
Filed Under Clients, Events | Leave a Comment

Tonight at Jen Bekman, Kate Bingaman-Burt’s Obsessive Consumption opens. Kate does some fascinating work about consumer behavior — notably, her own. She documents most of her purchases through line drawings and photos. My favorite work is her credit card statement series. Along with many other types of receipts, she creates a line drawing of every credit card statement she receives, and sells it for the minimum amount due.

That’s a fascinating exercise about regressive value in art: typically, later editions in a series become more expensive. Here, the more successful the work is, the less expensive it becomes. Of course, there are ways to combat this: pay off some cards and focus purchases on one card. Or, you know, buy lots more stuff. Either way, it’s a lively dialectic, and provides a concrete record of value from the get go.

Jen’s branding (I didn’t develop the logo, though I am very fond of it) entails two outline boxes that encroach from the left and right, implying a continuation on the back side (we do this as often as practical). Logo and address block are in the two boxes. We vary colors (red, knockout white and grey) as need, with red being the dominant color. For the postcard (above) we took advantage of the particulars of Kate’s work approach, and she created the postcard as a single piece of art, rather than using a piece from the show and putting the logo over. Deciding to run with this, I trimmed out the logo art and we made custom letterhead for the press release and show materials (snippet below).

Kate is also doing the wall vinyl (instead of transfer letters, she hand-painted it), and even did the price list to imprint on the letterhead. The only thing we missed was the website (we still need to move the back end of Jen’s site from Web 1.0). Come by — don’t forget your credit card.

TONY meets jbSL

Posted on December 6, 2006
Filed Under In The News, Clients | 1 Comment

This week, Time Out New York featured our first Second Life project, the jen bekman gallery presence (our progenitor also does all the jen bekman marketing materials). It’s only a capsule piece, but does cover the general background. He, we decided to spend some time talking about he specifics of making the jbSL space (this is the SLURL — that’s a direct link in world if you have an SL account).

The design of the space started initially as an attempt to mimic precise the physical jen bekman space on Spring Street. It was the most expeditious response, given a limited time frame, but interesting transposition questions arose right away: unconstrained by physics, and featuring a viewpoint that was highly malleable. In SL, by default you take the ‘traditional’ first person video game position, with the camera situation just behind your head. This makes navigation easier for those not used to immersive 3-d environments, and provides peripheral vision that you lack from ‘mouse-view’ (which is the SL terms for the fully immersive view).

Since a gallery is all about ‘looking’, and to many users, SL is no more, as soon as we started building we encountered problems — the narrow dimensions of the bekman space couldn’t be reproduced, since the default camera position when looking across the transverse axis (the only way to see the art dead-on) put the camera outside the gallery, and the requirements of isometric dimensional projects made the art seem much smaller when reproduced at actual size.

So everything got bigger, an effect of SL in general: space is cheap, and the viewpoint challenges listed above come into play in all building situation. We had also hoped to find an environment that mirrors the character of NoLIta, where the jen bekman galler is located. Time constraints made this difficult, along with the realization that, given an abundance of cheap land, dense urban environments are still a number virtual years away.

We held to the physical characteristics of the space — exposed brick on one wall, pressed-tin ceiling. The major changes had to do with circulation: locations in SL can be approached from every axis, as well as a direct teleport, so entry points are less hierarchical. Many places even dispense with a roof, since there is no weather, and many residents fly around. Seeing actual activity or interior characteristics can draw people in.

We kept to a pretty didactic notion of a gallery, embracing a traditional modernist gallery aesthetic. The details I enjoyed most were the chance to use terrazzo for the flooring material, and inserting an almost transparent threshold between the ‘main entrance’ and the gallery proper (teleporting deposits you on the ‘porch’ seen in the photo above). It is a pretty basic exercise in delineating separation between inside and out, but done without all the tribulations one encounters in RL with walkable glass surfaces.

Soon to be Famous(ly).

Posted on December 1, 2006
Filed Under All about (ahem) us | Leave a Comment

Welcome to Famously. Neither you — nor we — most likely, are, but this association is sure to bear the ripe fruit of celebrity. If not, we’ll just go manufacture it. That’s what we do.

Well, that’s a bit much. We can’t manufacture fame, but we can put you in nice clothes for the trip. You probably already have all the necessary qualities, and a good tailor is all you need.

The journey we will outfit you for is a very particular one. Call it a game, or a distraction, or the future of networked social interaction, but for the time being, the evolution of however you think of the internet may well be Second Life (SL). What is Second Life? Well, there a many answers for that. We will delve into them as we go along, since most everyone is new — over a million residents in the past three months alone.

Famously builds — environments, buzz, relationships, the life of a brand in this still developing ‘other world’. We aren’t a traditional agency, and we didn’t start this because we invest all that much faith in ‘branding’ or ‘trend spotting’ or what ever it is that overpriced consultants do. We make things, and we know people and we are friendly. That is not to say that we don’t take seriously the project of communication — be it for a person, product, company or idea. Only that the magic pixie dust that seems to accompany ‘strategic brand management’ only adds a layer of overhead to what may already be a complex problem.

Famously was started because our progenitor had a client that needed a project done in Second Life, and right quick. Turns out we managed a decent job of it, and the particulars of this environment spanned a wide range of our design interests, and even dovetailed with our occasional forays into internet publishing and promotions, to say nothing of long abandoned conceptual branding and identity notions.

That’s sounds very high minded, and some of it even is. Since Second Life looks like one big experiment right now, we decided to consciously situate our effort in a likewise experimental way. We’re going to figure it out as we go along, just like everyone else in SL.

But if you are responsible for the care and growth of a brand, you might have some basic questions. So, yes, we are actively pursuing work, relationships and opportunities in SL with real world organizations. We hesitate to say ‘we will build you a store’ or ‘we will host an event’ because so much is still ill defined. Part of this site will function as a resource of plain talk about what seems prudent for the brands we typically associate with, and opportunities for other organizations in which we have an interest.

Rather than be a part of them mindless land rush, we think the best strategy is to start slow and talk conceptually. So that’s going to happen here as well. But if you want to move more quickly, hit up the contact link and we’ll talk. Oh, we make all kinds of things in the real world too, in case you need that sort of thing as well.