Creating the playbill and program for a licensed theater production

The goal for this project was to design a playbill cover and program for the show. Playbill offers official playbills through its service, Playbillder, and we planned to design the content and order programs through it, but this got scrapped since wanted to include headshots and bios for everyone who worked on the production. I instead created a custom playbill with a QR code on the back that would take you to a digital program.

I started my design process by reviewing the program covers for two renditions of Merrily: the original 1981 production and the latest successful 2023 production. I wanted to create a cover design that was inspired by the original covers, but still unique in its interpretation, so I noted what the original covers were trying to convey and applied it to my own work.

As I was thinking about the photo booth strips and diary motifs, I realized that scrapbooking is a similar method of conveying memory. Polaroids can also convey friendship as the photo booth strips do.

What if the cover had a scrapbook motif, which included stickers, polaroids, and other items from the show?

I started the cover by designing a sticker that would say the name of the show, and also act as a logo. I wanted to bring the show business motif from the original production's cover, so I incorporated the embedded lights and a retro typeface into a sticker. After several iterations and a color palette shift, I created the current logo.

With the logo done, I created stickers for the directors and creators of the show. I was inspired by the covers of several regional productions of Merrily that included a clock and numbers as a nod to the different time periods the show takes place in. I included that motif in the stickers, utilizing the negative space and sticker placement to make it seem like the numbers were falling down the page through the stickers.

The photo for the Polaroid is from a photoshoot that was done with the actors. I applied a light blue and pink filter to the Polaroid to give it a "rose-tinted glasses" look. The ticket at the bottom is a rendition of what a ticket would look like from the musical created by two of the main characters within the show. Since this was no longer an official playbill, I couldn't use the playbill branding. I replaced it with custom branding to fit with BU on Broadway, the facilitators of this show.

Each person who worked on the show sent in a headshot and a bio, and I created a set of four frames to house each person's name/role and headshot. Clicking on the frame opens up their bio.

Some people did not send in headshots and bios, so I created a default bio and added the name/role sticker without the headshot attached.

Creating the frames with each person's name/role and headshot already took long enough, so I utilized Claude Code to speed up the process of matching company member data to their respective frame. I fed Claude Code a spreadsheet of all of the company members, and it formatted the data into JSON format. I then renamed each frame file with the name of the person and had Claude Code match the file names with the company member data.