No one cares about opera and ballet any more, Timothée Chalamet proclaimed earlier this year. Far from crushing the sector’s spirits, that casual comment seems have sparked a determination to prove these art forms’ enduring relevance.
We’ve already seen Seattle Opera’s classy response to Chalamet’s comments. Over in the UK, the Chalamet controversy was in mind when it came to crafting the Welsh National Opera’s new branding.
As it approaches its 80th anniversary, the opera wanted to refute the Hollywood actor’s view with a progressive, contemporary identity that would present opera with the “energy of an electric night out”.
Bwtic, the Welsh design studio behind the project, says the WNO rebrand is intended to reassert the company’s cultural authority and mark a change in artistic ambition.
At the heart of the striking new identity is a minimalist, versatile mark referred to as the ‘O Frame’: essentially an ‘O’ with an open rectangle in its centre.
The studio says the device was “born from the frustration that Opera is too often seen as one particular story told in one particular way”. Instead the frame presents opera as a platform for changing stories.
The outer circle is intended to represent opera itself as a medium and art form while the inner frame represents each individual production with its unique story, subject matter, message and point of view. “The dissonance is intentional. Square pegs. Round holes,” Bwtic says.
The O Frame is accompanied by a bilingual wordmark that was designed to give equal presence to Welsh and English with the idea that readers would see their language first.
“Opera is an art-form that has always been comfortable with interchanging languages. Welsh organisations have often struggled to find balance between the Welsh and the English language; eager to avoid any bias. In our new logotype, it is the eye of the reader that finds their own language first,” the studio says.
As for the typography, Bwtic delved into the archives and developed a new system inspired by GT Standard. The Grilli Type foundry’s upper-case, condensed sans-serif was used in a 1946 poster made to promote the opera company’s first production.
The new typeface functions as a bold and modern continuation of that font’s direct and authoritative language but makes it flexible enough to serve for a wide range of digital and print uses, or even cheeky jibes at Hollywood actors.
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For more recent typography news, see the anti-AI font created using an optical illusion.
