Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

be seen from a block or more away—on real playbills, posters, and
billboards, not as mere pastiche, but as functional design elements.
The Shakespeare Festival graphics were based on a simple format.
Key words like freeand livewere greatly enlarged, satisfying Wolfe’s desire
to address the public in a direct, no-nonsense manner, like sale signs in
supermarket windows. Likewise, enlarged fragments of the titles of plays set
in bold gothics, like the words wivesfor The Merry Wives of Windsorand
gentsfor Two Gentlemen of Verona, drew attention to a linguistic mystery and
provided a distinct contemporary identity that Evan Shapiro, director of
marketing for The Public, said was like giving a news report rather than an
ad spiel. “The approach is not complacent,” he added, “it says we’re here,
come see us, or we’re coming to get you.” The typographic posters were
placed on telephone stalls around New York, hung in commuter railroad
stations in the environs, and on a few select billboards. They were intended
to draw passersby into a visual game of deciphering the meaning of the
words. If they missed on the first try, the ads were positioned close enough
that on second glance the message was revealed. Flyers and handbills with
this ersatz call-to-arms typography were also sniped around town in a blitz
of paper promotion that is typically New York.
Language by its very nature is a communal thing, and Wolfe
and Scher, who have their own personal shorthand, believed that the
syncopated sounds formed by the truncated titles and phrases
communicated through bold type, dark rules, and bright colors would
develop into a conversation between the people of New York and The
Public Theater.
The cornerstone of The Public persona was its logo, a
combination of Scher’s visual/linguistic elements that shouted the word
public,which was spelled out in a sampling of black woodtype letters in
weights ranging from heavy to light set against a white field; the words The
and Theaterare there, but subordinate to the dominant word/idea. In
addition to the main logo, Scher designed round logos, or what Wolfe
called “tokens” (The Public is built over the Astor Place subway station) for
individual theaters. The next level in the hierarchy of communication were
accordion-folded flyers that when completely unfolded (to a length of
around two feet) revealed the entire season’s programs in a typographic
array reminiscent of Victorian theater bills, a sharp contrast to the usually
quiet treatments of most mainstream theatrical subscription materials.
An exception to the pure typography rule were the posters for the
individual plays, many of which included photographs—such as the
emblematic silhouette of tapmaster Savion Glover on the poster for that
tongue-twisting titled musical,Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk, which