Hult Center Rebrand |
Curiosity Capital
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The Hult Center is a performing arts venue set in the heart of Eugene, Oregon. Built by the people of Eugene, the center has an impressive history, drawing audiences and artists from afar into its unique towering glass structure.
Operated by the City of Eugene, we worked closely with a wide stakeholder team to create a new brand identity for the center that could reflect the energy of the stage and every facet of the arts.
Typeface customisation: Ellen Luff Type Foundry
A cascade of culture
A truly unique building with stunning architectural features, the Hult Center takes centre stage in the Eugene landscape, with its peaks echoing those of the cascade mountains. These dynamic angles became a core feature throughout the identity, informing the energetic and flexible design system.
After extensive research and collaborative workshops, we looked to reposition the Hult Center as a Curiosity Capital. As a destination of empowerment. A venue to reflect the energy of the stage, and every facet of the arts. A central point in the heart of Eugene, bringing together a cultural collective to uplift and inspire.
Peak Performances
The iconic peaks of the building and dynamic cuts are embedded in a new logo and wordmark for the Hult Center, and across a suite of monolithic subbrands for their programs and series, creating strong ownership and accusation with the master brand.
A unique cut
Inspired by the angular cut beams used in the building’s construction, we commissioned a custom cut display typeface. The typeface comes with three distinct cuts, each offering a variety of angular cuts and intersections. A typeface packed with variety.
A flexible design grid system
All designs are underpinned by a consistent yet endlessly flexible grid system, providing rigour and familiarity across all communications, whilst remaining versatile enough to create unique campaign themes within the overall look and feel.
The full spectrum of the arts
A new vibrant colour palette to represent the full spectrum of the arts. Offering countless combinations, the new palette ensures the Hult Center has a complimentary match to any show artwork, photography or themes, helping align the center much closer to the acts and artists they have on show. Tonal gradients further expand the new palette.
Reflecting the stage
Unique versions of the logo and wordmark literally reflect the glass facade of the building, allowing the Hult Center to share centre stage with the performances they feature.
10 x 10 series look and feel
A key aspect of the rebrand was also to allow special series and programmes to be able to adopt a unique campaign feel whilst still being strongly aligned with the core brand. The new 10×10 series uses all the core assets, but utilises a bold X image window as a template across all 10×10 series promotion.
A comprehensive set of brand guidelines fully documents all brand assets and their use, outlining rules and offering inspiration and best practice use of the new brand identity.
Working with Common Curiosity on the rebranding of the Hult Center was an absolute dream. From the outset we knew that our ultimate goal was to find a partner that could help us realize a brand that was as vibrant and compelling as the performances on our stage, and through this partnership we’ve found it. The team at Common Curiosity are very passionate about this project and able to bring some incredible insights and experience to the mix that helped us get going on a very ambitious timeline.
Throughout each step of the process they continued to amaze us by bringing forth new and compelling ideas, showing us different paths and looks, but all the while keeping them tied to the core needs of the project. Already, this project is helping people to see our venue in a new way, one that is exciting and future focused that supports the arts that built it, but challenges us to champion the arts to come and how we continue enriching the lives of our community. In the end, this project has surpassed all of my expectations and we continue to work with Common Curiosity on longer term projects as we know we still have exciting ways to implement this brand and further deepen the Hult Center as one of the most exciting Performing Arts Centers on the west coast.
Rich Hobby | Director of Marketing | Hult Center