Nocturne Hall

A season identity printed in two inks, one of which is the paper. It reads in a foyer at full light and at half.

Nocturne Hall runs ninety concerts across a nine-month season, and had been commissioning a new visual identity for each one. The result was a foyer where nothing agreed with anything, and a marketing team spending its budget on origination instead of on audiences.

The hall itself gave us the constraint. Its foyer lights are dimmed forty minutes before each performance and stay down through the interval, which meant every poster we designed would be seen at two very different light levels by the same person on the same evening. We stopped treating that as a problem to survive and made it the system: a two-ink scheme in which the second ink is the unprinted paper, so contrast comes from the substrate rather than from a colour that collapses in low light.

Stand cards, 148 × 210mm, printed one side. The only piece in the system that is read at 20 lux.

Programme notes set 9/13pt. Measured at 62 characters, which is the widest line that survives a hand-held reading angle.

House curtain, 11m drop. The season's only fixed graphic sits on the pelmet above it and is never lit directly.

Ninety concerts now share one poster system, originated once and populated by the hall's own team. The season is set in a single family at four sizes, and the only variable across the programme is the concert's own information, which is the only thing that should have varied in the first place.