Graphic Details: 150 Years of BAM Visual Identity

Image: Detail of the BAM 1995 Next Wave Festival brochure, designed by Michael Bierut

How do you make one thing speak for a place that does many things? And how often should that thing change throughout the course of 29 presidential administrations, two world wars, and the advent of live tweeting?

Most importantly, should it have serifs?

From the 1860s until the 1970s, the BAM visual identity was a motley assortment of styles reflecting shifting zeitgeists and programming. Letterpressed broadsides and hand-drawn invitations for the Civil War years. Civilized neoclassicism for the genteel interwar period. Modernist typeface mashups for the era of Sputnik. In the 1970s, the identity became more focused with the creation of a new logo. In the 1980s, artists and designers like Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, and Massimo Vignelli offered their creative twists.

But it was in 1995 that famed Pentagram designer Michael Bierut developed the iconic BAM identity that persists today today: the News Gothic typeface, blown up to big scale, and cropped in various creative ways. Enjoy this tour of pre-Bierut BAM visual design, together with a closer look at the way designers have kept his original conception alive into the present.

20 years of BAM Design Celebrated over 100 Days

by Clara Cornelius

The BAM look is identifiable anywhere. As the Creative Director at BAM, I find myself talking to a lot of people about our identity. A friend recently described it as "all cut off and hard to read, but, like, in good way.” Similarly, most people who I talk to about BAM's design say they recognize it when they see it, that it's "all chopped up" and they "like how it's hard to read."

Our visual identity was created in 1995 by Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram. He was tasked with creating a cohesive graphic identity for the Next Wave Festival, which went on to define the design for BAM as a whole. The core of the concept, from Bierut himself:

Fragments of News Gothic type obscured behind wide stripes became the basis of the Next Wave look, used on all festival posters, advertisements, invitations, and brochures. Practically, this design system allows for the use of very large type, even in cramped applications such as newspaper advertisements. More poetically, the use of type stepping from behind horizontal lines suggests the next big thing coming over the horizon. 

I've seen the design evolve and grow beyond the benchmarks of Michael's original concept--we've pushed and pulled at it, testing its limits to keep it relevant to new generations. Sometimes it is hard to read, but that is often the point.

So here we are 20 years later, and the beautiful, flexible system that Michael Bierut conceived in 1995 is still going strong. To celebrate our design anniversary, we will be participating in another Bierut-derived concept, The 100 Day Project, by showcasing 100 different ways his identity has been applied.

The project was inspired by a workshop Bierut taught at Yale, and has since evolved into a popular social media “event,” thanks to Elle Luna and The Great Discontent. This is the second year of The 100 Day Project, and starting Monday, April 6, we (and the rest of the internet) will post a photo a day highlighting our project. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at @BAM_Brooklyn and the hashtag #100daysofBAMtype.

Clara Cornelius is the Creative Director of BAM.

Creating a Graphic Identity for Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

At BAM, we pride ourselves on creating a visual identity as adventurous as the artists on our stages. From print materials to web presence, we continually play and reinvent our brand to reflect the programs, while keeping within the flexible style guidelines established by Pentagram's Michael Bierut in 1994. When announcing Crossing Brooklyn Ferry—a three day music and film festival curated by neighbors Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National—we had an opportunity to create something really special that reflected the unique communal spirit of the Brooklyn artistic community.

Appropriately, the first seeds of the artistic identity sprouted from Karl Jensen, a Brooklyn artist who has worked with The National. The Dessners put us in touch with him, and we were blown away by his ideas—he was inspired by everything from Walt Whitman to Woodstock. Here are a few of the images he showed us:

Whitman himself, who penned 
the poem Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Woodstock as an American Eden 

Early American frakturs

Some of Karl's sketches of Whitman-esque, musically-inclined children 

Most of all, we loved these incredible instruments he created out of cardboard. Lovingly hand-embellished and meticulously crafted, they spoke to the kind of DIY ethos we were trying to evoke, as well as a kind of childlike innocence—almost like playthings:

Here are a few words from Karl about the project:

I wanted to convey the intimacy of making things in the studio, the open-ended play and the joy of creating something. That sense of “I can do that,” giving yourself the freedom to make your own world. It’s all a very youthful thing to me. And of course Whitman, with his energy and sense of wonder, so easily embodies this.

Given such exciting source images, BAM's designers then had to work at transforming them into a website with its own distinct identity. Creating an identity involves many interconnected elements, such as a logo treatment, primary and secondary typefaces, color palettes, and guidelines for usage. For our designers, the challenge was to create something new that still fit in with our existing brand identity—something that still “looked like BAM.”

Being BAM employees, the web designers wanted to do something adventurous—to play with the instruments using the inventive technique known as parallax scrolling. This creates an illusion of depth perception on a flat screen, so it was particularly appealing for this project because Karl’s instruments would appear more real. It took a lot of work but we think the result is pretty groovy. Let us know what you think in the comments!

Check out the finished product at CrossingBrooklynFerry.com