Zoom-in Online

Legend Paula Scher and Pentagram have unveiled their new identity system for NYCB, the country's preeminent ballet company, and perhaps the world's. Whether it is good or bad may not be the point; it's design speaks much more to the pragmatism of design than the need to create something beautiful and personal.

The new design, pictured below in contrast to its earlier iteration, is a sleek and modern solution. Modern in the traditional sense of the word (i.e. "less is more"), and modern in the "cutting-edge" sense as well: the identity was created to be malleable.

According to Pentagram's web site, the new identity reflects NYC's skyline and overlapping forms, and its mechanical typography reflects the architectural nature of both ballet and Gotham herself. The transparency gives the crowded mark a much needed weightlessness.

I've personally designed logos for dance companies. It's not easy. The challenge of creating a static design for an inherently dynamic art form is quite the quagmire. My solution for Six Degrees was an energetic burst of dancers erupting into a number 6. Fans thought it captured the companies exuberance; critics thought that it looked like all the iPod people having an orgy. Solutions for dance companies in general tend to accentuate movement over stasis, and grace over architecture. To that end, a rather quiet, "corporate" design is a nice way of separating the NYCB from its competition. But I'm left feeling a little bland and dry.

Well, Paula explains this on a number of levels. First of all, having a logo that optically feels like it is in motion means that it will fight the photography it lives with- two things in motion and you'll have nothing with which to hold down the page. The contrast actually helps the photography, and vice versa. The second big issue is that NYCB can't afford to continue to hire Paula to do the design, so she needed a mark that was easy to work with and able to remain consistent in the hands of freelancers and small agencies. A high-maintenence mark would die a miserable death in the hands of an incompetent designer. In Paula's own words: "I suspect the "missing" something in the identity is that lack of personal obsession. The identity is deliberately designed so that almost anyone reasonably competant [sic] can execute it, even a student. I suspect that if the execution is consistant the progarm [sic] will become a wonderful vehicle for dance photography. But when something is designed to be systematic rather than personal, something is always lost. It is always one of my greatest dilemmas when designing identities for large scale organizations."

In this age of "systems," it's important to realize that this design is used in conjunction with beautiful cropped black and white photography. Paula says of this: "...choreographers NEVER want you to crop a ballet dancer. Check it out in the next Sunday's Times. You'll see I'm right. Getting Peter Martins (The NYCB director) to accept that a ballet dancer might be entering a frame, and therefore be cropped, and could even be silhouetted, was serious work, and it may be my biggest contribution to the vernacular of ballet promotion."

It's also important to bear in mind that the ballet is attracting an audience of crusty old people, a demographic of 65-80 year olds. The initiative to attract young people is really a proportional endeavor; young here being people in their 50s. But the approach has worked, the new campaign has boasted over 1000 extra tickets for the new season.

It's always easy to be on this side of the critic's chair, and there's nothing more gratifying than taking pleasure in a legendary designer's B+ work. But as a working designer, I fully appreciate the complexity of dealing with a conservative client who needed a great design on a budget. Scher's solution, while not groundbreaking, is elegant, efficient, and bold. It's also quiet, which is something America has never really appreciated. But now that I've lived with it for a few days, I think it's effective. Which is a rare thing of beauty these days.