The Sixteen are a world renowned choir who perform a variety of classical material spanning many centuries. As well as playing to packed audiences they recently appeared on Damon Albarn's The Good the Bad and the Queen album.
The printed material they were previously using was quite traditional and didn't look 'designed'. I suggested they improve their image in print in order to bring them up-to-date and possibly broaden their appeal. For this particular brochure, promoting an important run of concerts at the Southbank Centre, I introduced modern layouts and used lots of black, made less serious by some carefully chosen accent colours at the edge of the pages.
For this programme to accompany a concert of seventeenth century religious music, The Sixteen licensed the image of the cruifix from the Victoria & Albert museum. Inspired by the image and the religious context of the music, I created a dramatic background for the cross image which was described by someone as 'blood thirsty'. The use of red and black proved to be really evocative of the drama and depth of the music. With the internal pages I wanted them to look rustic as if they had been extracted from the period itself without going over the top. With the spread, top right, I wanted to change the shape of the page in the readers eye from being a standard rectangle to that of a ragged piece of parchment paper.
The main aim was to inspire people as to the historical context of the music and, like all good programmes, give them something they could take away and treasure.
© chris woodrow 2008