William Shakespeare, the most celebrated English language writer and the world’s greatest dramatist, had a festival dedicated to his works in Curitiba, southern Brazil. As a partnership between three of the most important local universities and a beloved bookstore chain, the collaboration brought readings, plays, group studies, and conferences to the city’s calendar of events, including music concerts from the renaissance era.

The festival organizers asked us to create a visual identity that matched the level of the performances, seminars, and lectures. We needed to explore a direction not often seen in renaissance dramaturgy festivals, appealing to a wide demographic of college and high school students, senior literature followers, and theater enthusiasts, while cutting through the visual noise in a city of 1.9 million people.

Shakespeare explores one distinctive attribute that drives the tension in his story-telling: polarity. We explored it in our visual language by taking a minimalist approach, with a vector illustration that stands out from other renaissance festivals and by choosing the color purple – only to be used by the nobility of that era – matched with orange and earth tones – the opposite end of that spectrum denoting the lower class.