SafeFest

Creating a highly visible and recognizable brand for a team dedicated to safety at music festivals.

Working with C3 Presents—the force behind top music festivals such as Austin City Limits and Lollapalooza—Puncture was tasked with creating the visual identity for SafeFest; all with the goal of standing out in a crowded and visually dense festival environment.

We developed the SafeFest hand raised in the air—a universal symbol representing a need for help, wanting attention, or having a question. It’s a gesture that is intuitive and can be understood quickly.

The Safest Hand also serves as a mascot for the brand. It takes on a positive and fun persona with its different hand gestures. It’s meant to make asking for help feel more accessible, differentiating itself from EMT or Police.

We paired the hand with a bright neon safety yellow. It’s meant to draw attention from a distance, in the dark, or under impairment. It’s a non-authoritative colour that will encourage festival goers to ask for help and watch out for each other.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

SafeFest is a brand new team dedicated to creating a safe space for music festival patrons by providing an additional resource that isn’t medical or security.

Launched in 2023, SafeFest found it’s way to many festivals, including Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza, and Austin City Limits and will continue to be present at festivals on an ongoing basis. If you need any assistance at an upcoming C3 festival, look for the helping hand or the SafeFest team in yellow T-shirts!

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Dream in High Park
Robert McLaughlin Gallery
Choice Eastway and Caledon
Canadian Stage

Creating a dynamic and accessible visual identity; leading to sold-out performances and industry acclaim.

Canadian Stage’s mission is to be the leading contemporary performing arts organization in the country. They came to Puncture in 2021 to refresh their master brand; they wanted to move away from being seen as a “contemporary art/intellectual/elitist” organization, towards something that was more accessible, reflecting “the art of today.”

After an in-depth research and discovery phase, the master brand we created for the organization is punctuated by a straight bold line, representing a stage. This line underscores the logo and can be extended to make connections to programming, and can also twist and turn to become more expressive of movement and live performance. A bright yellow that is easily recognizable and welcoming ties the brand together.

Since 2021, we have worked with Canadian Stage annually to create marketing collateral for their seasons, including the season brochure, out-of-home print ads, digital and social ads, video and motion assets, and sub-branding for the Dream in High Park series. For the 2022/23 season we directed and produced a photo and video shoot featuring key actors from the season’s productions, to be featured in all of the marketing collateral.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

Canadian Stage is one of Canada’s leading non-profit, contemporary performing arts organizations based in Toronto, Ontario. Founded in 1988, the theatre company has since produced over 300 shows with a focus on multidisciplinary work, text adaptation, programming international contemporary theatre, and developing and producing new Canadian works. Canadian Stage also continues to promote theatre to younger audiences, running a series of artist development and education initiatives, as well as youth and community outreach programs.

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Herb
Choice Eastway and Caledon
TAS
plazaPOPS

Building a new website and visual assets for a community organization that transforms underused spaces into accessible gathering places.

The new website for plazaPOPS captures the energy of suburban main streets in Toronto, using a vibrant colour palette and expressive street sign motifs.

Industry
Arts & CultureNon-Profit

Service
BrandingDigital

plazapops.ca

plazaPOPS is a non-profit organization that transforms parking lots and other under-invested spaces, into free, safe and accessible gathering places. Largely located along suburban main streets where vibrant culture already exists, plazaPOPS partners with these local community groups, landowners and businesses, to support and celebrate these vital connections.

Their initiatives impact many different communities, in which Puncture was asked to create a new website that helps visualize and showcase the value that’s being created. The website captures the organization’s playful personality and forward-thinking initiatives, and provides an infrastructure for their events, programming and research—creating an open invitation for everyone to get involved.

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Choice Properties
Weston Family Foundation
Brodflour
Yonge-Dundas Square

Celebrating 20 years of connection, community, culture, and diversity in a prominent Toronto public space.

Yonge-Dundas Square is a unique focal point of the downtown Toronto community. The square is designated for use as a public open space and as a unique event location. The square has a rich history and is a meeting point for the arts, community and culture.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

In celebration of it’s 20th year, the team at Yonge-Dundas Square worked with Puncture to create a brand campaign to celebrate this anniversary. The campaign was inspired by five important themes: connection, community, culture, together, and diversity. The foundation of the system uses bright colours, historical photos and text, all on a square grid — inspired by the concrete squares at Yonge-Dundas Square.

The design highlighted the Square’s diverse history and also helped advertise events over the 2023 summer period. The on-site work helped add to the vibrancy and excitement of events at the Square. Our team is looking forward to seeing what will happen next at Yonge-Dundas Square!

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plazaPOPS
Brodflour
The Filmmakers
Robert McLaughlin Gallery

A brand refresh and new website design for the largest public art gallery in the Durham Region.

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery (The RMG) engaged Puncture in 2021 at a time when they were establishing a new strategic plan with a fresh mission and vision. Puncture took on both a visual identity refresh and a complete website redesign with the goal of better reflecting the RMG’s updated mission, collection, and cultural presence in the region. 

Emphasizing the RMG’s artist-centered and community-focused approach was a significant goal for the project. We achieved that by opening up the RMG’s logo, and creating a playful colour palette and inviting layouts for the website

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingDigital

Website Development
Helios Design Lab

Gallery Photography
Darren Rigo

rmg.on.ca

The Robert McLaughlin Gallery is the largest public art gallery in the Durham Region of Ontario, Canada. It houses a compelling collection of modern and contemporary Canadian art numbering over 4500 works. They are an artist-centered and community-oriented public art gallery that brings people from diverse backgrounds together to engage with art that inspires new perspectives, generates meaningful conversations, and creates a sense of belonging.

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Toronto Biennial of Art
Canadian Stage
CAMH Virtual Tour
Tafelmusik

Helping a world-renowned Baroque orchestra invite new audiences in, with a simple and bold brand identity.

Tafelmusik, a world-renowned Baroque orchestra and choir, tasked Puncture with refreshing their visual identity and communication platform. Their main goals were to increase and diversify their audience and donor base. It was very important that the new brand honored the past while embracing the present—they needed to show they were moving forward without alienating their current audience.

We built a new brand strategy, positioning and communication toolkit. The entire brand is rooted in the idea of sharing beauty, which foregrounds all of Tafelmusik’s performances and is the reason why so many people have dedicated their lives to this music. We landed on “Tafelmusik invites audiences to engage with beauty through evocative live music experiences” as the brand position.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

Taking the cue of “sharing beauty,” we developed a succinct visual identity that’s equipped to handle new and changing sub-brands, a rich colour palette and elegant imagery. The identity is informed by the beauty, symmetry and colour found in baroque art and architecture, which is emblematized in the signature diamond wordmark we created. The masterbrand was built with flexibility in mind, it expands to create unique season identities that incorporate new imagery and colours that are inspired by the season’s performances.

We continue to work with Tafelmusik on their marketing and content creation on an ongoing basis. This includes creative direction of season identities, signage, print and digital pieces, email and digital marketing, video series, and a seasonal magazine.

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Robert McLaughlin Gallery
ORXSTRA
WayHome
Dream in High Park

For Canadian Stage’s summer performance series, a visual identity that dreams.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingMotion

A return to the company’s original summer moniker, Dream in High Park is Canadian Stage’s transformed summer programming series. Dream in High Park is one of Canada’s largest and longest running outdoor professional theatre events, taking place at the High Park Amphitheatre, and welcoming over 30,000 audience members to the park each year. The transformed program features a shift from the usual summer Shakespeare fare to a diverse array of events including theatre, dance, comedy, contemporary and baroque music, and so much more. 

Canadian Stage engaged Puncture to design a new visual identity to express this exciting vision, featuring a logo with a dynamic voice and a colour palette that dreams.

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TAS
Tracks on Tracks
Weston Family Foundation
WayHome

Naming, branding and launching the Canadian music festival that changed everything.

After branding and launching Boots & Hearts Music Festival, festival producers Republic Live approached Puncture with an ambitious objective. The goal was to launch Canada’s biggest music and arts festival—create the brand, sell the tickets, and deliver a best-in-class experience over multiple days.

Puncture was tasked with selling a brand new event and experience that need to stand out in a saturated marketplace. We did this by creating eye-catching design work backed up by strong a communications platform—all without an existing lineup. We created business development tools to help secure required funding, and honed our marketing and strategic capabilities to give this event a larger-than-life feel. The wildly successful launch campaign, which featured interactive puzzles, social media teasers, and a postering campaign, remains one of our proudest achievements.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingVideo

Puncture was able to create and launch a now iconic brand and on-site experience, which eight years on is still talked about. WayHome sold over 35,000 tickets in its first year, attracting attendees from each province and from 32 states in the U.S.

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Fit4Less
6 Degrees
Canadian Stage
Toronto Biennial of Art

Building a visual identity, communications toolkit and wayfinding strategy for Toronto’s first-ever biennial of contemporary art.

In 2019, prior to launching the inaugural Biennial to the public, TBA came to Puncture to define its visual identity. A key feature of the Biennial is that all of its exhibition sites are located near waterways that are significant to Toronto: Lake Ontario, the Humber River, Don River, and more. We came up with a vibrant brand that is inspired by nautical flags and symbols, these appear in the bold graphic devices we created. 

The system is bolstered by artwork treatments, a celebratory and accessible colour palette, and a custom wordmark to bring the importance of public and free art to the city’s consciousness. In addition to visual identity, we helped simplify the Biennial’s communication platform and got it to its most distilled form, “72 days of Free Art”.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
Branding

The Toronto Biennial of Art’s (TBA) mission is to make contemporary art accessible to everyone. For 10 weeks every two years, local, national, and international Biennial artists transform Toronto and its partner regions with free exhibitions, performances, and learning opportunities.

Since the inaugural year, we have worked with TBA on all aspects of their marketing materials including communications, digital production, graphic design, video production, motion graphic design, and environmental and experiential design. 

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Sidewalk Labs
Canadian Stage
CAMH Campaigns
CBC Exhibitionists

Crafting an unignorable motion identity for CBC Arts.

Industry
Arts & Culture

Service
BrandingMotion

Exhibitionists is young, daring and born of a passionate and personal connection with innovating artists across genres from diverse communities across Canada. It features provocative artists working in all mediums who are disrupting the status quo whilst celebrating their cultures. Exhibitionists is the go-to destination to discover Canada’s fresh and diverse talents, and to get up close and personal with established icons.

Working with the CBC, we were tasked with crafting a striking and memorable visual identity for the program. Additionally, we designed a dynamic motion graphics kit for broadcast. We also had the honor of conceptualizing and editing the show’s captivating introduction, making Exhibitionists the ultimate destination for exploring Canada’s vibrant and diverse artistic talents.

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ORXSTRA
CAMH Virtual Tour
Tracks on Tracks