reverie — Michele Hratko

Branding a student-run dance concert for CMU’s largest dance organization.

I independently created the identity, promotional materials, and day of show assets for DS’s spring show. Every semester DS creates a dance concert with student choreographers, dancers ranging in skill levels from beginner to advanced, and various dance styles from ballet to hiphop.

Read more about the project here in an interview with CMU School of Design!

Brand Identity, Print Design, & Graphic Design

Time: March - April 2024, 8 weeks
Role: Sole designer
Tools: Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign

photos by Meena Sundrum

Brand Guidelines

Banners and Posters

These 4 color palettes and gradient treatments served as the basis of the brand identity across print and digital materials. One of the posters was also translated into a 48 x 75 inch banner to be hung outside of a main CMU building.

me with the banner!

Shirts

Each dancer received a shirt to wear backstage and for the opening dance of the show.

photo by Em Lugo

Social Media

Instagram posts and stories to advertise and sell tickets to the shows.

Day of Show:
Programs and Tickets

Attendess received a physical ticket at the door and VIP attendees also received a printed program with the show order, performers, and dance descriptions. The program was also available via QR code.

Process

With the theme “reverie” I was immediately inspired by gradients, especially a gradient in the word mark. While trying to figure out how to expand the gradient style into assets for the posters, I realized that I could achieve a similar distressed gradient look by scanning charcoal. I drew a bunch of gestural dancers with charcoal, scanned them into photoshop, and then created a composition of 3 figures. This ended up being the core of the design system along with the logo. The hand drawn letters of the logo and fluidity of the dancers together evoke a dreaminess and haziness that comes from being lost in a reverie.

Some early compositions, before the show producers and I decided to add in more movement and dance energy.

At the same time I was exploring different hand drawn letters for the wordmark.

Core assets: dancers, wordmark, and both combined

Color Palettes:

After solidifying these assets, the next steps was choosing colors for the posters. I initially was drawn to monochrome posters to match the shirts but they weren’t as high energy as they could have been. Selecting colors for the posters involved printing out a lot of variations to ensure that the text and gradients would be readable when printed, especially because there was so much detail in the gradients that I didn’t want becoming muddy.

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