Portfolio / San Francisco Opera
San Francisco Opera is known for its world premieres, breakout young sensations, and visionary leadership. Strategic vision and exuberant design powers fresh, vital, and emotional campaigns that capture the company’s excellence. Whether appealing to opera sophisticates, opera novices, or the City’s leading philanthropists, San Francisco Opera campaigns continuously pack the house, season after season.
The 2018–19 Season campaign reveals how opera is a portal to hidden emotions and experiences. Through opera, we unlock something deep and embrace primal feelings. It is a tool to self-discovery that taps into what’s alive in you. You feel, relate, connect, and share.
Through emotive script and silhouette images, the 2018–19 Season comes alive, connecting the emotions inside the characters on stage with those in the audience. Through the exploration of these grand themes, we find that in the particular lies the universal, and conversely, through epic narratives, we find magic in detail.
Opera is the music that moves the City. Music comes to life in different ways for different people, creating variety in the storytelling for the 2017–18 season campaign. With custom, motion blur photography created to capture the pulse of patrons and the vibrant neighborhood surrounding the opera house, we see that San Francisco and its opera create a synergy that feeds off each other—one can’t exist without the other.
Opera cuts through the everyday to reveal exotic locations and a patina of lush escapes. Depth, layering, rhythm, and movement brings the season to life through photography and typography, inviting established opera patrons as well as those new to the art form to find the extraordinary beyond the ordinary.
The essence of classic opera, The Ring, is an interwoven fabric of struggles: between good and evil, male and female, fire and water. San Francisco Opera re-contextualized the traditional work, The Ring, in a 20th century American story to help reveal the timelessness of this epic tale. The staging of their production makes it approachable and relevant. In parallel, pinpoint design distills and demystifies the 19 hours of Opera over 4 days into single iconic moments that capture the scale and power and epic storytelling that is The Ring.
A spectrum of color crescendos outward from the flaming red of the epic hero Brunnhilde out to the halo of the golden ring. The narrative arc of the epic is captured in five banners that begin with a theft of treasure from rivers depth to its ultimate return—and the cataclysm that its wrath unleashes in between.
On the 50th anniversary of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, the Opera went psychedelic with 60’s inspired posters—which were themselves inspired by late 19th-century art nouveau opera posters. With original illustrations commissioned from renowned Oakland poster designer Matt Leunig, the posters capture a trippy tryptic of love in all forms: unconditional parental love, lustful bacchanal lust, and youthful passionate romance.
