Problem
As Aldeburgh Music expanded its programme of activities beyond the annual Aldeburgh Festival of classical music it needed to attract and communicate effectively with different types of audiences.
Response
A series of graphic designs has been organised around a unifying principle – ‘a sense of place’ - whilst being flexible enough to take on different styles for different groups of people.
Result
The organisation has successfully expanded to include the more populist Snape Proms, an education programme and artist development services, without losing its core identity and communication.
Aldeburgh Music is a world-renowned performance centre, best known for the annual Aldeburgh Festival of classical music. The organisation has worked with Colchester-based graphic designer group Silk Pearce for around ten years, during which time it has gradually reached out to new audiences with a wider programme of activities.
Aldeburgh Music’s communications materials had already been organised by Silk Pearce around the central theme of ‘a sense of place’, evoking the organisation’s location beside the reed beds at Snape. But communicating with different audiences requires different visual approaches, as Silk Pearce director Peter Silk explains: ‘As the organisation has continued to grow – and also with an eye to attracting new audiences and participants in the future – we have had to think about how we can talk to these different groups of people, but still maintain an overall Aldeburgh Music look and feel. Our solution has been to develop different strands of imagery for different concert series, so that images for the (more highbrow) Aldeburgh Festival are more enigmatic than the more playful ones we use we use for the Snape Proms, which attracts a wider audience, including holidaymakers. And the educational programme aims to be attractive to teenagers, without being patronising, so is quite bold and uses colour in a different way to the main festival materials.’
Working with Silk Pearce, Aldeburgh Music has been able to present a distinctive and consistent set of visual communications that are still adaptable to new areas of activity. ‘At Aldeburgh Music, we came to believe that the different audiences we engage with – opera lovers, young professional musicians, New Music aficionados, chamber music connoisseurs, the young generation who go for digital arts, and many more – not only need an individualized approach, but that in fact there are also various smaller families living within the larger Aldeburgh brand,’ says the organisation’s head of marketing and media Marc Ernesti. ‘Silk Pearce have been fantastically helpful in making us understand, translate and visualize these different ‘registers of tone’, and still preserve the very clear and bold Aldeburgh family sound. By focusing on how we communicate at various levels Silk Pearce really focused on who it is we are talking to. This is what graphic design at its best can be about, I feel.’
Organisation type
Performance centre, festival and artist development www.aldeburghmusic.co.uk
Graphic design services used
Identity, print materials
Designers
Silk Pearce
www.silkpearce.com