Creating a logo for Ragtime

Last Sunday, the digital version The New York Times Arts Fall Preview included an interactive feature on the development of the Ragtime artwork. The feature narrated by Gail Anderson, the creative director of design for SpotCo, shows different approaches and tag lines for the show that opens this October 09.

Since SpotCo break through campaigns for Chicago and Rent, they have delivered some of the strongest artwork and visuals of the theater / Broadway world. And their Ragtime work is an excellent sample of their strongest suit.

The Ragtime feature covers four different concepts and some variations. Gail explains the decision criteria and how important for a Broadway campaign is to be flexible and expandable. Flexible because there are a lot of elements that may need to be featured (such as different performers, shots of the actual show, etc) and these elements may change through the run of the show. Also a campaign may live for years to come and require different interactions.

The final choice is beautiful and plays the then and now them on the line‘Their Time / Our Time'. Personally, although I love the visual, I think some of the other tag lines were stronger, I really liked ‘This is the Sound of / Something Beginning / An Era Exploding / Everything Changing’ that I think are more relevant to the themes of the show.

For the time being, Ragtime has a very straight forward website, but I will keep an eye out on them and see what do they come up with.

The long planed sequel to The Phantom of the Opera seems to be gearing up for its West End premiere.

The original Phantom has been doing very well digitally with the engaging vBlog “The Phantom’s Lair”, although sadly it hasn’t been updated in almost a year. What it is a pity, because it such a fantastic channel for a show like Phantom that has been running for so long but it is still well alive and kicking.

But back to the future: A straightforward site was launched recently, for the sequel, Love Never Dies, in conjunction with a twitter feed and a FaceBook widget gearing up to some big announcement for this coming October 8th.

The site has a simple intro that bridges from the original Phantom to the sequel that takes place in NY’s Connie Island. The twitter is, of course, in the voice of the Phantom, and it started with two hilarious tweets in Latin (a first one?).The widget is again a twitter feed with news about the sequel.

Maybe a bit too much twitter, but it’s still early and It would be interesting what other digital strategies the Phantom comes up with. It is a no-brainer for such a global production, as the show is, to take advantage of the digital space.