Responses by Louis Mikolay, creative director, COLLINS

Background: Music is one of humanity’s most powerful creations—it meets us at our emotional center. However, “classical” music suffers from an ongoing and ruthless PR problem: It is often perceived as unchanging, dusty music for elite audiences only. Facing this challenge was the San Francisco Symphony, a 108-year-old cultural legend with international acclaim, who partnered with COLLINS to reaffirm classical music as a crucial and evolving art form as well as to completely reimagine the organization’s mission and brand as a model for the future of music.

Reasoning: We asked ourselves two questions: How can we build a brand and an idea that captures the essence and the potency of classical music? How can we push the Symphony’s presence to be unignorable?

As the Symphony already experiments with emerging technologies, our work also lives in digital, sonic and artistic experimentation. An evolving design system brings to life the dynamic qualities of classical music itself. We used responsive and variable font technology to add an unexpected contemporary behavior—giving each typographic character the ability to instantly change form in reaction to sound and music. We also crafted a more expressive voice that juxtaposes a timeless formality of black and white with a more-modern palette inspired by the unique colors and environment of the Bay Area.

Challenges: Developing original, new ideas with a diverse group of internal stakeholders can be a challenge but also a great creative opportunity. So, we created a project Brain Trust that brought together leaders and representatives from all corners of the organization to be an integral part of the process from the beginning. We hope that together, with partners like Dinamo, we have crafted ideas, voices and expressions that will help accelerate classical music as the most contemporary art form in the world today.

Favorite details: At its heart, classical music is an interactive experience. Listeners are open to interpret the music in their own way. The Symphosizer enhances this idea by inviting listeners to explore a completely personal, even emotional, visual journey during a performance. The motion of the letterforms symbolizes the emotional expressions of the piece itself, uplifting layers and details in the music, which may have previously gone unnoticed. The Symphosizer feels especially powerful in this particular moment, as audiences are craving the live events and performances that they’ve lost because of the pandemic.

Visual influences: We were inspired by the Symphony’s visionary new conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, and the way he is exploring classical music as a contemporary art that never stands still. While it’s true that the origins of classical music are hundreds of years old, it has also been in a constant state of flux since its inception. We hoped to craft a visual expression that calls attention to that dynamism, so that a new generation of audiences can discover the magic for themselves.

Anything new: We learned a lot about sound, especially while working on the Symphosizer. Exploring the complexities of capturing sound and converting it into useful data that can not only affect the type, but also visualize it in a way that “feels” fascinating. There are hundreds of parameters to consider—some we could control, like how a specific volume affects the height of a letter, and some that we could not, like how loud the sound is that a user inputs. Ultimately, we re-learned that the best way to achieve what we wanted was experimentation and constant iteration.

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