Louisville Chamber Choir Branding
Tuning forks, medieval letters, and process
Brand identity work for the region's premier chamber choir.
In September 2024 I took on a contracted position as Social Media/Marketing Coordinator for the Louisville Chamber Choir. I’ve been wanting to help this organization for a while so I was glad to get to join them in a formal capacity.
I officially started one week before the first concert of the season where we soft-launched a whole new ticketing system. We then fully launched the completed new ticketing system at the next concert, the busiest concert of the year. In the interim, I worked with my friends at Mammoth Creative Group to get the new website they were building for LCC fully off the ground and in my hands for day-to-day editing. Having completed these necessary operational tasks, it was time to make the brand.
In case you are unfamiliar, coming up with logos, symbols, and such at the end is actually nearly the opposite of what you want to do. I see a lot of (often valuable) writing on the Capital D design process and all that where folks are like “no, no, no you have to follow step 1, then 2, then 3,” but I do think it’s important to have formative experiences where you realize what is “supposed” to happen and what actually happens are sometimes pretty far apart.
Anyway, I wanted whatever I made to feel like an evolution or continuation of LCC’s history. While they might not have any formal brand standards, over their 11 years they have done a good job of consistent, clean graphics, and nicely made concert programs. Additionally, because Mammoth had spent so much time on the website I wanted to be respectful of their work and pull what I could from it. This meant using their font pairing (Frank Ruhl Libre and Barlow) and working with the gold-ish color they used for buttons.
When I think about what LCC does well I think a lot of early music (like Palestrina), and on the opposite end of things, I think they also excel at contemporary music (yes, yes mein gott they also do Mendelssohn well). I wanted to make something that reflected those two extremes. One immediate thought that came to me was to look at the score of Thomas Tallis’ “Spem in allium,” a really unique piece they’ve actually performed twice. To give you an insight into how my mind works I first had this idea at about 2 a.m. while in an Uber from the airport in Kansas City to the hotel. Of course, as soon as we checked into the hotel I had to start investigating.
As I poured through various early music scores I got really interested in Lombardic capitals, these really crazy and cool characters - typically a single letter - that are found at the beginning of a piece. I spent a lot of time working really, really hard to make an entirely custom one. Eventually, I decided that a simpler solution was probably for the best, and took a few elements from the custom creation and used those to modify LCC in Frank Ruhl Libre type.
For the symbol, I also tried a few different things. I investigated different possibilities inspired by shape-note singing and ways to play around with those types of figures. While the logotype is a nod to early music, as I hinted at above I wanted to do something much more contemporary. When I think of good classical music branding the Berlin Phil is a big reference. I love their logo. Finally, one of the semi-iconic things folks in the choral community in Louisville will probably think of is Dr. Kent Hatteberg (the LCC artistic director and conductor) and his tuning fork(s). I came up with this brand symbol play on a tuning fork. It’s fine but lacks a bit of character.
I was resolute on going deeper, believing that if you just keep digging something will come. Another thing to note about Dr. Hatteberg’s choirs is that they don’t sing in equal temperament like you might hear on a piano. This is all incredibly niche and nerdy stuff but they use Pythagorean tuning. Knowing this I headed to the website of Catherine Lamb (a composer I really, really, really love) who has a bunch of resources and diagrams of various tuning systems. It was there I found my answer.
Here I found out about Lissajous curves. Using mirrors, light - and critically a tuning fork - Lissajous curves can be created. These curves led to a host of other inventions not relevant to this discussion. As an aside, at the time of writing, I’m realizing that Meta, part of MIT, and others also use varying Lissajous curves as their logos so I guess this wasn’t a terrible idea. I didn’t want to just pull out any random curve and run with it, I wanted to pick one that was intentional. There are four voices (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) in a standard choir, and in early music you often have five parts (soprano 1, soprano 2, alto, tenor, bass), so I made a Lissajous curve that was at a 4:5 ratio. I also set the dimensions to be 4:5. Other curves at different ratios will eventually be created to generate textures and backgrounds for images.
