Evolving a Brand
Project: Rebrand TLCC & Design Supporting Collateral
Client: Tessitura Network
Role: Brand Designer, Graphic Designer, Creative Director
Brief
Overview: Tessitura used the pandemic as an opportunity to revisit their vision, expand their mission, and grow their brand. 2020 saw the cancellation, for the first time, of their Tessitura Learning and Community Conference (TLCC). This event is put on annually by Tessitura to bring the community of Arts & Culture professionals together.
Problem: More than ever, the pandemic gave us a need to come together and share our stories. How can we best support our partners while preparing for a new era of conferencing? Our community events are fragmented and ill-defined, how can we evolve our branding to suit our expanding needs?
Solution: Create a plan to gather. Deliver the conference virtually in 2021, then work towards a hybrid strategy over the next 3-5 years. Rebrand TLCC and define the style and tone of their collective community events. Redesign the mark to create an evergreen logo that fits in with the primary branding, and present the conference as a worldwide, multi-event community initiative under one cohesive look. Promote unity and accessibility, while delivering even more with the event than ever before with each subsequent year, both digitally and in person. Produce refreshed print collateral and digital assets, working with key teams to develop best practices and grow opportunities.
Developing the Logo
Examples of Tessitura’s Australian community event, to be brought under the new TLCC branding.
Previous TLCC logos (top) with the redesigned TLCC logo (bottom), showing the evolution of the brand.
Process illustration of the redesigned TLCC logo (top) with Tessitura’s primary logo (bottom)
Redesigned TLCC logo applied to upcoming locations according to cadence of events.
History
In previous years, the conference logo was themed differently each year, and thus had a new mark and inconsistent styles for each event. In addition, the international conferences were run independently from the primary U.S. event, with no unifying direction.
A New Chapter
To create an evergreen logo for the conference we needed to define the styles and create consistency, while identifying the key aspects of the brand. The TLCC acronym was deemed an important through-line due to it’s rich usage history.
About the Updated TLCC Mark
This acronym-focused mark creates an implied arch within the type and adds a supportive tie underneath - emphasizing the range and texture of the primary brand while giving the sub-brand a phrase of it’s own. The goal was to create something strong, simple, and timeless.
The TLCC acronym carries 10+ years of significance for the Tessitura Network. It has grown in power over the years and has established a positive reputation, earning itself landmark status within the brand. This design approach recognizes the importance of the acronym to the Network, and cements it as a pillar within the community.
The acronym rests on top of the Tessitura Tie, whose importance cannot be understated. This arch holds the brand together and connects the Network’s vision. The design carries the tie through to the sub-branding in a simple but effective way, both to reinforce the values of the organization and sustain the supportive nature of what the tie represents.
The tie is adjusted in breadth according to the acronym’s character length, while maintaining suitable proportions to ensure the mark is balanced and understood at any size, while matching the scalability of the primary Tessitura logo.
Carrying the Brand Throughout the Event.
I worked with the Leadership Team to design their presentation slide decks. In his TLCC 2022 closing session, “What We Learned,” President Andrew Recinos shares how arts and culture institutions can thrive in uncertain times.
Unique Requirements for a Unique Conference.
New brand, new platform, new normal — the materials looked a little different during the first virtual-only event as we all figured out what works and what doesn’t work. User Guides were supplied to sponsors and exhibitors, as well as Swapcard App-attendees to help keep the event accessible.
Building Sponsorship Opportunities Within the Brand
New opportunities emerged as we rebranded and developed a platform to facilitate the conference, both for communication and showcasing sponsors. I worked with the Sponsorship Team to gather support for each event location, developing a new interactive PDF to advertise sponsorship opportunities, and creating a new standard for visual opportunities.
Styling Templates for Best Practices
Swapcard was the platform chosen for building out the virtual, in-person, and hybrid TLCC events. The intuitive and cross-platform nature of this conference app let teams customize and style the platform to their needs. I worked with the Event Management team to set the style parameters, and equipped them with PowerPoint templates as a method to ensure a cohesive branding effort. Using these slide decks, event specialists were able to build out event agendas while maintaining, editing, and creating headers, ads, and additional assets on an as-needed basis.