Kelly Murray Farrell was the founder and artistic director behind three separate, but overlapping entities—Ballet 180, a professional dance company; Studio 180, a school of ballet; and Move 360, a community outreach wellness initiative. This multi-channel identity was confusing to understand and challenging to manage, causing slippery traction in the marketplace. What the studio needed was some outside perspective to help streamline its identity, devise consistent methods of communication with its disparate audiences, and advance its core belief to do good through mind, body, and spirit.
The studio strongly encourages people to use dance as a means for self-expression, self-discovery, and holistic well-being. We allowed these unique values to take center stage in the new brand to separate Ballet 180 from the crowd. Our first order of business was to reduce the cluttered architecture to ensure a singularly focused name to maximize visibility and create natural opportunities to cross-market. Aesthetically, we found the competition erred heavily toward neutral, black & white, and monochromatic color palettes paired with moody imagery draped in dramatic light and traditional serifed typography. These identities felt sophisticated and artsy, but they lacked warmth, energy and youthful curiosity…and no one could match Ballet 180's dedication to community outreach and its mission-driven point of view. This was the studio's differentiating factor.
The beauty of dance is conveyed through its graceful combination of motion, balance, and precision; a color palette that is energetic and approachable—a reinterpretation of classic primary colors; hand-drawn typography that creates a sense of movement and flow, and has the potential to capture unique personalities when executed by multiple hands; and layering high-quality photography.
A simple typographic approach conveys a multifaceted visual metaphor. The dot represents a pivot point for 180-degree transformation, an exclamation point for confident affirmation, and a ballerina toe point for figurative representation. It is bold, memorable and places a premium on the organization's name to build familiarity.
If the page is the stage, the flowing, hand-drawn typography is the dance. Paired with a humanist sans serif that has a bit of a curve (precise yet friendly) the combined selections enable a high degree of flexibility from headlines to long text applications.
Poster Series
We took Ballet 180's existing mantra and refined it down to three clear, repeatable, and memorable words—Kindness, Activism, Humility. These are used on printed collateral and posters in the studio spaces to promote positivity, healthy lifestyles, and community engagement.
Untuck’s values meshed with our own, and they helped us to refine our name, brand identity, and mission. The work is top-quality and always delivered on-time; they’re very organized. Now we have confidence in our brand: we’re able to communicate who we are, what we stand for, and why we’re doing what we do.
— Kelly Murray Farrell, Owner & Artistic Director, Ballet 180
