Logo for performing arts organization

Pittsburgh Song Collaborative

The Pittsburgh Song Collaborative is an association of talented singers and pianists who perform classical art song (settings of poetry for voice and piano) in the Pittsburgh region and beyond. Unlike other more traditional classical music organizations, we strive to reach out to our audiences with interactive and interdisciplinary concert events. We take a multimedia approach to performance in collaborating with artists in other fields (theater directors, visual artists, etc.) and other cultural organizations (museums, universities, etc.) to make our concerts as accessible and engaging as possible. We want our audiences to relate to the music we’re performing in a relevant and familiar way. Although most of the music we perform is “classical,” it’s really not much different in kind than cabaret song, Broadway, folk song or pop song. In fact, sometimes these non-classical genres rub shoulders with the works of Schubert, Debussy and Rachmaninoff in our programs. Our organization is in its early stages, so we are looking for a logo that will help us establish our identity effectively and memorably.

Those who already enjoy intimate classical music will automatically be interested in what we do, so our goal is to reach out to newer, younger audiences as well through programming, collaboration, and branding/marketing. Our target audience is intellectually and artistically curious, sophisticated, and hip. We want to encourage young professionals to see our concerts as opportunities for a fun and intriguing night out, but we don’t want to alienate the more traditional baby boomer audience for classical music either.

Our goals:
We want our logo to communicate to potential audience members that the experience they will have is relevant and contemporary. It needs to make people feel that this “classical” music event is for them, too – no tuxes and tails here. Some of our target audience will be coming to a classical music concert for the first time, even though they may already be engaging in other cultural activities like going to art museums and attending theater performances.

- Must be effective in color or black/white
- Delivered as PSD or Ai file
- Suitable/legible in a variety of media (e.g. website, large-scale poster, business card, etc.)
- Contemporary, relevant, engaging, dynamic, elegant in a modern way
- No clip art or stock images – the entire design must be original
- The obvious strategy, perhaps, would be to include a piano, a singer, or music notes. A logo that had these things wouldn’t be disqualified, but we encourage you to be creative; we want the logo to convey the experience above all. The danger of using piano or music notes is to fall into a cliché, although the right designer might do something extraordinary with them. Think outside the box. Clean but a little edgy.
- Our performances are acoustic – no microphones allowed!
- The icon could include the initials or the entire name of the organization, but it doesn't have to.
- No cartoons, recycled logos or overly complex logos
- It's okay to use the iconography or geography of Pittsburgh as inspiration, but we're not necessarily looking for that.

Star rating system:
0 - Hasn't yet been evaluated
1 - Not the direction we want to go in
2 - Some things we like, but needs changes
3 - Getting closer, but needs revisions or a different take
4 - Definitely under consideration, may just need a few tweaks
5 - Don't change anything, we're considering it just as it is