Canton Symphony Orchestra 2023/2024 Season Materials

Canton Symphony Orchestra reached out to us again to begin building materials for the 2023-2024 season. We've been working with them for years, so they asked us to handle their 2023-2024 season postcards, season brochure, and program book.

Their season is divided into 2 main sections, Masterworks and Pops, where there are 7 concerts and 4 concerts, respectively. Each of these needed a 4x6 custom designed postcard with the event's title and information. In addition to the 4x6, it was also necessary to include 4 additional sizes of each card to be used in other marketing efforts such as social media. Crucial to this set of postcards was a unifying feel in the design, so we selected a similar art style and a unifying bar on the bottom of the graphics for all ticketing information.

In addition to the original 4x6 Design, CSO requested multiple sizes of these cards in different dimensions for use on their website and social media. In total, we designed 55 cards.

Another major part of the CSO Season material is their brochure, which has frequently asked questions as well as general information about the overall season. This large brochure unfolds unto a 16-panel sheet, with 8 panels on each side. We designed this using a bright color palette with similar colors used in the cards, and a similar font to that used on the cards. We selected our title font to used Montserrat, with Playfair Display being our accent font. This combination allowed us to achieve a bold, punchy feel while maintaining the subtle, classy qualities that the previous season design had.

Finally, the season program book is meant to be a glimpse into everything going on at CSO for the season, from messages from staff as well as detailed biographies about every piece being played in their masterworks concerts, this is meant to be essentially a condensed version of their website all in a 100-page zine.

We maintained the color palette and font selection when it came time to update their website design. Building on the design we had already done last year, we updated their font selection to our new fonts, inverted the dark theme to a white theme, and swapped out their purple and subtle blues for our brightly inspired color palette. To tie it all together, we made use of a subtle paper texture that was used on all the season cards to make it feel cohesive.

The Summit FM's New Website

In January, The Summit FM based in Akron, Ohio reached out to us about their upcoming rebrand. This non-profit radio station was undergoing a process to revamp the image of the organization to a sleek, revised, modernized version of itself. Along with this brand update, they asked us to come alongside them to develop a brand new website.

Their old website was built in WordPress, but was created multiple years ago in a form that made it difficult to update. In addition, there were certain features of the site, such as the ads and the music archive, that didn't function any longer. Thus, there were a few goals that we set out to do when building the new site.

First, we wanted to stay on wordpress. Since they had already been operating on wordpress for a long time, it made a lot of sense to stick with it. It also provides a solid CMS for them to continually update the site, as one of the new features they wanted to implement was Summit Now, a form of blog where they could talk about all the things going on in the music world. Second, they wanted a way to show concerts and events going on in the area that improves on their old system, which was a google calendar embedded onto the page. Third, they wanted to get a functioning music archive and now playing system again, which existed on the previous site, but had ceased to function at some point. In addition to making the music archive function, they wanted to open it up to displaying more than a single day's worth of music history, which the old site could not do. Lastly, they wanted a music player to play what was live on the radio. So, we got to work.

The first stage of our process was to organize and prioritize all of our information, creating a game plan, schedule, and outline of what work would need to be done. We then began mocking up our design in Figma, to test out a number of different ideas for things like headers, menus, and more.

We also arranged what our rough menu layout would look like, determining what pages we needed to create and sending the team at The Summit off to begin writing any page copy that we would need.

We decided that features such as the music player and music archive, while important, were not core to the site's functionality. As such, we decided to schedule those as the final pieces of the development. The main bulk of work was developing the site, which was done in WordPress using a combination of custom code and pages built in Oxygen Builder and Kadence Blocks. The home page contains a number of unique features, including a custom-built radio schedule that displays the current content-block for the station based on the time of day, as well as the next few hours of station content. Also included is a list of upcoming events and recent sessions from the Summit's member's only concerts, Studio C Sessions.

When it came time to build the Music Archive, the first thing I did was examine the previous site's code to determine how it worked, and to see if I could understand why it stopped working. I discovered that the music archive was functionally intact, and was stored in a custom SQL table outside of wordpress. While the front-end of this code that would display it on the site wasn't functioning, the backend of the code which kept the archive database up-to-date had been functional the entire time, keeping a record of every song the station played from 2012-Now. I made the decision to re-develop a brand-new front-end for this system while reusing significant portions of the old back-end. While the previous front-end and back-end were both done in PHP, I wanted to do the new front-end in javascript to increase the flexibility. The existing backend also lacked comments for much of the code, so I went through the code and left comments as necessary. Included in this was a new method to fetch data by the date, allowing me to implement a date selection feature that could provide up to 2 weeks of viewable archive.

The final portion of this project was The Summit's music player. It is built using javascript that contains a state for both of The Summit FM's radio stations, The Summit and The 330. By default, a page loads with The Summit in a 'paused' state. However, the user can choose to 'play' either of the radio stations. If another station is paused or playing when the user presses play on the opposite station, the player automatically pauses the first station so they cannot play at the same time.

Overall, this was an incredibly complex and time consuming undertaking, but it was a mountain of fun and I'm so happy to have been a part of such an overhaul.

Great Lakes Wealth Management - Branding Refresh

Great Lakes Wealth Management, owned and run by Wayne Maslyk in Sandusky, Ohio, has been around for multiple decades, helping people prepare for retirement, as well as helping retirees manage their retirements. When it came time to renew his old logo, he knew that he wanted to keep a similar, iconic lakeside feel, and more so just refresh it. So we approached it with the idea that it was not a total re-design of the logo, but instead just an adjustment. First thing we had to do was re-make the old logo, as it hadn't been updated in years, so all we had to work on was a couple of low-quality images of it. We re-created the old logo from those images, and then worked to soften the edges and make it feel a little smoother. We then picked out a brand new color palette that we based off of his old one, paring a beautiful yellow and blue that go great with white. We finished it off with a new font pairing, and a variety of layout options. This new logo has been in use all over the area on local TV stations and in local magazines and flyers. What an awesome little project!

Canton Symphony Orchestra 2020 Show Cards

Canton Symphony Orchestra in Canton, Ohio reached out to us to design a set of postcards that could be used to advertise their 2020 set of shows, of which their were 8 in total. For each show, they wanted a 4"x6" postcard that they could both use in mailers as well as post online. These shows ranged widely in themes, from 80s music to a tribute to their director, and they wanted the cards to all have a very distinct feel for the show, but all to be united by some common design threads. We decided to do a design set that trended around hand-drawn simple art using basic shapes, filled in with interesting colors and gradients. Then, we used a select subset of fonts and sizing to unite all of the designs. The final result is an incredible set of postcards!

Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 restrictions, CSO was forced to cancel some of these shows, and some of them have been re-scheduled to 2021. If you'd like to check out what shows are coming up, you can visit their website here.