Count Basie Center for the Arts
FOUR YEARS IN-HOUSE FOR A PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, SERVING MARKETING, EDUCATION, AND DEVELOPMENT
CLIENT:
Count Basie Center
for the Arts
ROLE:
In-house Graphic Designer
SCOPE:
Brand identity, capital campaign, event design, social, event photography
YEAR:
2017-2021
The Count Basie Center for the Arts is a nonprofit in Red Bank, New Jersey, with two performing arts venues, an arts academy, and a movie theater. As the in-house designer for four years, I supported multiple internal stakeholders: the marketing team promoting more than 300 shows and events a year, the Academy serving more than 1,000 students a year, and the development team raising the money that keeps the nonprofit's mission going, through both campaigns and events. Day to day that meant print and digital design across the Center's programming, from artist admats and brochures to email, social, signage, and event photography. That cyclical work ran alongside larger one-off projects, including the three below.
THE APPROACH
Invite the community in.
The theater at the heart of the Basie Center has stood since the 1920s. It's where locals had their first dance recital or saw their first Bruce concert, and the name honors Red Bank legend Count Basie. In 2016 the Center began a $20 million capital campaign to expand the historic theater into an arts center encompassing a city block. The final phase of that public campaign was not just about raising the last of the funds. It was about community buy-in, and about reassuring people that the Center valued its history as much as they did.
I built the campaign's framework, starting with the name: Count Yourself In. It's an invitation to the public to be part of the expansion, and it keeps Count out front, a signal that Count Basie and the Center's history stay at the center of the institution through the changes. The tagline lays out the tenets of the mission and what the expansion would add: count on world class entertainment, count on engaging education, count on being inspired. The logo introduces the Center's new footprint, and the campaign ran across print and digital, including the pitch deck that laid out the story.
Two schools, one mark.
The Basie's performing arts academy had acquired a music conservatory and was rebranding as the Count Basie Center Academy of the Arts, an umbrella that could hold every educational offering under one name.
The mark is a triangle built from three shapes: the two schools sitting on the academy that supports them. It uses the three colors of the Basie logo so the Academy reads as part of the institution rather than beside it, and the form borrows from classic educational imagery, a torch and a pediment, so a newly named school would still read as academic and established. The angular geometry led the brand guidelines, and I took the identity out across the website, the quarterly brochure, email, advertising, and social. On social I held the angular style constant and rotated the palette by season, so a parent scrolling past an enrollment post can tell at a glance which session it belongs to. Programs that used to look unrelated now read as one school.
Make every touchpoint an experience
The Summer Gala is the Center's largest annual fundraiser, with tickets from $575 to $25,000. Blondie was headlining in 2019, so the night was CBGB.
I designed the 2019 gala in full. Over 24 feet of custom wall panels, invitations, the program, digital screens, signage, VIP lanyards, and sponsor recognition. The approach was to build the club rather than apply a punk motif to a tent: grungy backdrops that set the room and marked off the VIP sections at the same time, and sponsorship levels named after Blondie songs and treated as stickers, so recognition read as band merch instead of a donor list. Instead of a traditional step and repeat I developed a photo backdrop guests sticker and signed on the way in, so immediately upon entry they were getting into the theme
THE OUTCOME
Count Yourself In closed the final phase of a $20 million campaign, and the 2019 gala brought in more than $550,000. The Academy identity was the one built to last, and it has outlived the name it was made for: the mark is still in use today, after the school took on a sponsored name.