Matt Willey Designs Custom Typeface for Vineyard Theatre Identity
The Pentagram partner contributes a new font to the ever-changing logo of the celebrated Off Broadway theater company.
Pentagram’s Matt Willey and team have contributed a custom typeface to the ever-evolving identity for New York’s Vineyard Theatre. Designed by NB Studio, the rebrand, which launched in 2023 with Vineyard’s 40th anniversary season, is always in flux, integrating a different font by a local NYC designer or type foundry into the logo for each new show.
Willey’s typeface becomes part of the Vineyard identity for “Russian Troll Farm,” a new workplace comedy by Sarah Gancher. Set in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election, the political satire imagines the workers of St. Petersburg’s infamous (real-life) Internet Research Agency, whose job is manipulating social media to advance Russia’s agenda.
In Willey’s version of the logo, the individual letterforms of “Theatre” are directly inspired by Russian typography, with the indistinguishable duplication of the word nodding to the idea of interference and infiltration of the trolls to influence the election.
Type study for the design.
Willey worked on the project with NB’s Reuben Alghali.
NB used Midjourney to generate the poster illustration—riffing on a line in the play that mentions AI—then worked further details into the image. Look closely and see if you can spot the Hillary Clinton campaign logo designed by Michael Bierut.
Vineyard Theatre is one of New York’s most prominent Off Broadway theater companies, recognized for its innovative productions of contemporary works. Pentagram’s Eddie Opara previously contributed a typeface to the new identity system for last summer’s production of “This Land Was Made.”
“Vineyard” remains the same across the identity, while “Theatre” is switched out to represent different shows.
NB Studio utilized AI to create the poster illustration.
