Catalog by Consequence of Innovation for CounterCurrent

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CLIENT

Cyn­thia Woods Mitchell Cen­ter for the Arts at Uni­ver­si­ty of Hous­ton is ded­i­cat­ed to ground-break­ing, trans­for­ma­tion­al col­lab­o­ra­tions across the per­form­ing, visu­al, and lit­er­ary arts—it com­mis­sions and pro­duces new works, presents pub­lic per­for­mances and exhi­bi­tions, offers cur­ricu­lum, fel­low­ships, and residencies.

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BRIEF

The Cyn­thia Woods Mitchell Cen­ter recent­ly trans­formed all of their pub­lic pro­gram­ming into a five-day fes­ti­val, called Coun­ter­Cur­rent. They need­ed a book for the inau­gur­al art fes­ti­val that felt sub­stan­tial and would help posi­tion the brand as edgy and exper­i­men­tal, yet did not stray too far away from their ties to the Uni­ver­si­ty’s brand.

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APPROACH

We looked at the pur­pose of the cat­a­log as two-fold: to build excite­ment about the fes­ti­val and to increase atten­dance. We set out to cre­ate a bold, beau­ti­ful piece that peo­ple would want to keep on their cof­fee table or open it if they saw it around town. That said, we also craved func­tion. The piece was designed small enough to be tossed in a bag and tot­ed around the fes­ti­val for ref­er­ence. Being a non-prof­it, bud­get was a con­cern (as was time­line) so we opt­ed to use a pre­mi­um paper, but to skip spe­cial tech­niques. The cov­er art ele­vat­ed the piece with bold bright hues and a sense of tex­ture with­out the extra cost.