Cinema Speakeasy is coming up on our one year anniversary in August 2010. To give ourselves an early birthday present, we enlisted the help of veteran broadcast and typography designer Micah Hahn to freshen up our look with a new logo.
Our ask was fairly opaque, something designer-unfriendly and maddening like: “We need something fresh, but not tooooo trend-centric. Artsy and hip, without channeling any obvious existing cultural reference points. Something that shows that we’re film-first and into drinking and shaking it up a bit, and that we’re not big corporate culture-hawkers, that we’re accessible and totally all about film and art…”
Yeah, poor Micah.
Anyways, after toying with some seventies-retro looks, he came up with an idea, which he translated into three colorways:
You’ll notice there are some options there, right?
We loved that, and we were toying with the idea of just switching out the colorway with a new one every month when Micah had the brilliant idea to switch out simple abstract colorways to also include images from our programming. Bravely, he created a template for us so we could easily do it ourselves on a monthly basis.
Check out the logo for May 2010, which Micah superimposed on an image from one of Alex Munoz’s FYI Film shorts:
We feel that this is a brilliant approach towards adaptable (and participative!) design for an organization in constant flux. We like how the ‘Cinema Speakeasy’ type-set is consistent and recognizable, but always framed by one of our films. It’s a direct parallel to Cinema Speakeasy itself: A new experience every month, but still consistent in its mission and execution.
Finally, this logo marks a commitment to highlighting our films as the most crucial element of the organization: Without the films, there is no Cinema Speakeasy.
So, in short, we’re geeked out. Thank god for smart designers.
