Brand Refresh for BATS Theatre
BATS Theatre · Brand Strategy / Brand Guidelines / Photography / Website · 2021 — Present
A scrappy, beloved Wellington venue, dressed for its next thirty years.
BATS Theatre is the Kent Tce home of independent live art in Aotearoa — a three-level repurposed historic building where the country’s emerging and experimental performance work has been made and shown for more than thirty years. Obvious built the brand strategy, the guidelines and a full website rebuild around it.
For decades BATS has been the venue where new work in Aotearoa gets its first audience. A buzzing year-round programme of theatre, dance, improv, stand-up and experimental performance, three multi-purpose spaces under one Kent Tce roof, a season schedule that sets the rhythm of Pōneke’s fringe and emerging-work calendar. Practitioners cycle through BATS at every stage of their careers — first show, first season, first national tour, first return. It is a venue with a culture, not just a programme.
By the time BATS came to us, the brand running underneath all of that had drifted. Materials were inconsistent across applications. The website — a critical channel for season launches, ticketing handoffs and audience-building — was due an overdue rebuild. The visual identity needed to be documented, codified and made portable so a small, busy in-house team could carry it across every touchpoint without re-inventing the wheel each time. The brief was a brand refresh that would honour BATS’s history without freezing it in amber, and a website to match.
The shift the work was meant to enable was operational as much as it was visual. BATS needed a system that the next staffer, the next freelance designer, the next visiting company could pick up and use. A brand that looked like the venue felt — irreverent, scrappy, beloved, never corporate — and that gave the team enough scaffolding to get the next season launch out the door without starting from scratch.
A brand strategy that protected the irreverence
The strategic problem was not “does BATS know who it is” — it does, and audiences do too. The problem was that nothing was written down. So when a new staffer drafted a season blurb, a freelance designer laid out a poster, or a company built a show campaign in BATS’s house, every choice was a fresh negotiation with a brand that lived in everyone’s heads in slightly different versions.
We worked with the BATS team to lock the strategy down on paper. The vision — live art lighting up lives — and the mission — to create safe spaces for artists and audiences to expand possibilities — sit at the top of the document. The three core brand values — bold, accessible, artistic — sit underneath as the test every piece of work has to pass. Tone-of-voice direction was written in three registers, because BATS communicates in three: a consumer-facing voice, a corporate register for funding applications, and a show-promotion voice that flexes to the personality of each individual production.
The result was a strategy document that left BATS recognisably itself. The irreverence stayed. The accessibility stayed. The system around it gave the team something to point a new collaborator at when the question of how do we sound came up — instead of relying on whoever in the room had been around the longest to make the call.
A wordmark that stood up to thirty years of posters
The BATS wordmark and icon system was built around a simple rule: it had to hold its own on a foyer wall covered in season posters, gig flyers, photocopied zines and torn ticket stubs — without becoming part of the noise.
We delivered three lockups. The primary logo is the core signature, used across most applications. The icon is the small-format mark — favicons, social avatars, anywhere a full lockup would not fit. The outlined icon is the occasional-use mark for merchandise and graphic patterns — t-shirts, signage, the kind of contexts where a flat fill would feel too tidy.
Each mark comes in a black-and-white primary colour-way and a red secondary colour-way. The black-and-white version is the workhorse — it should be used in most cases. The red is brought out for merch, signage, and any predominantly black design that needs a single splash of brand colour to cut through. Reversed (white-on-dark) lockups are spec’d for dark backgrounds. Clear-space rules use the B of BATS as the spacing module. The minimum sizes are spec’d at 10mm for the primary lockup and 16px for the icon — the size of a favicon, because that is one of the places it actually lives.
Two typefaces, one for working and one for shouting
Theatre typography has two jobs to do. It has to set a season programme cleanly enough that an audience member can find the show they want at the price they can afford on the date they are free. And it has to carry the personality of a venue that, by definition, traffics in spectacle. The BATS type system pairs two faces, one for each.
Gibson is the primary face. A humanist sans with a wide weight range — Thin through Heavy, plus italics — used for body copy, headings, large-scale titles and corporate documents. It is the face that does the daily work of running a theatre.
DK Downward Fall is the display face. A bold, irreverent display typeface used in expressive ways across consumer-facing material and social media — major headings, posters, the moments where the brand wants to grab a passing eye on Cuba St and make it stop. The guideline is firm: use it in a controlled manner, refrain from over-use, never set body copy in it. It is the typographic equivalent of stage lighting — used everywhere it would just become part of the wallpaper.
The pairing was deliberate. Gibson does the working, DK Downward Fall does the shouting. Together they let the brand swing between professional (an Annual Report cover) and unhinged (a one-night-only late-show poster) without breaking the system.
A website rebuilt to be run by a small team
The website rebuild was the largest single piece of the engagement. BATS’s old site was end-of-life; the new one had to do considerably more, with a backend a small team could actually maintain.
We rebuilt on Wagtail — an open-source CMS chosen specifically because it is built for editorial teams. The rebuild had a number of explicit goals: a better website admin experience for BATS staff; more opportunities to celebrate the artists at the centre of the programme; improved live-streaming integration (a capability that became non-trivially important during and after the pandemic); and stronger representation of BATS’ kaupapa and history on the front-end.
The design system carried the new brand into the digital space — the type pairing, the black/red/white palette, the textures and torn edges from the brand guidelines, all rendered in a way that holds up at season-launch traffic and still works on a phone screen at 11pm when somebody is buying a ticket from the bus. Hosting and ongoing support sit under a signed hosting agreement with us — Obvious has been the website partner since the rebuild went live, which means the build keeps getting maintained by the team that built it.
A photographic library, dusted off and brought back into the brand
One of the more pleasurable parts of the project was the photography. BATS has a treasured archive of photography that dates back to 1976 — a chronological record of the venue, its companies, its audiences and its building, much of it sitting in folders that nobody had opened in a long time.
We dusted those photographs off and built them into the brand. Historic images sit alongside present-day photography across the website and brand applications, telling a visual narrative of the space and the people in it across decades. Texture sits underneath both — paper textures inspired by crumpled ticket stubs and layered street posters, torn-edge treatments, grunge textures, ink splashes, painterly strokes — the kind of surface that makes a digital screen feel like a foyer wall.
A brand handed over to be used, not filed
Brand guidelines for a not-for-profit cultural organisation are a particular kind of document. They cannot be a 200-page bible that lives in a Dropbox folder nobody opens. They have to be picked up by a small in-house team with a long to-do list, by visiting freelance designers paid for two days at a time, by partner companies producing their own show collateral on tight deadlines.
We designed the BATS brand guideline document to be exactly that — picked up and used. Brand statements (vision, mission, values, tone of voice). Logo system (primary, icon, outlined icon, reversed lockups, colour-ways, clear space, minimum size, incorrect-use examples). Colour palette (black, red, white at primary; full tint range for design flexibility). Typography (Gibson for working; DK Downward Fall for shouting; type-use rules for both). Imagery categories. Texture system. Worked brand examples across document design, the Lumen bar menu, posters and social assets.
Working on a cultural institution or performing-arts venue?
If you are a cultural institution, performing-arts venue, festival or arts organisation thinking about a brand refresh, a website rebuild, or both — and you would like a partner who has done that work with one of Wellington’s most beloved independent venues — we would love to talk.
