behind the NFTG rebrand
“colorful and sophisticated, but not like a fun house”
Today is the official five-year anniversary of Nothing for the Group. (Here’s the first one, which went out to 120 people on July 17, 2020. Remember when theatres thought they’d magically resume in-person performances in January 2021? What a time.) To celebrate this milestone, I'm sharing some behind-the-scenes content about the recent NFTG rebrand, including the alternate designs I didn’t choose.
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The decision to rebrand the newsletter didn’t come from dissatisfaction but from the particular restlessness of something working too well. Six months after NFTG launched, I asked my friend and former Studio colleague Elizabeth Morton to design a logo. I loved what they created: the hot pink block font and geometric dividers all felt clean but charged, like a neon sign buzzing outside a bar.
(Side note: Elizabeth is moving to New York City! They’re an all-around delight and a tremendous graphic & costume designer and you should work with them.)
But somewhere between 2021 and now, more theatre companies adopted a fluorescent palette. I’d scroll through the NFTG Instagram and see my own aesthetic choices reflected back from a dozen different theatre accounts. To be clear: not copied, but simply echoed in the way that trends evolve. (After all, influence is never a one-way street: the old brand was inspired by this book cover.)
So when the fifth anniversary rolled around, I knew it was time for a shift, even though the old design had been serving me well. I hired Kiana Toossi at Holiday Studio earlier this spring. I loved her visual style—minimalist, refined, playful, nostalgic—and I loved that she primarily works with hospitality and tourism brands. The deliberate distance from theatre felt necessary, as I wanted to resist the gravitational pull toward the popular or obvious. (A design evoking playbills or theatre ephemera made me full-body cringe.)
I'd been collecting inspiration images for about a year, assembling this chaotic mood board of conflicting design impulses:
(Unbeknowst to me, Kiana designed that Palmore ad in the center during a past internship—a coincidence that confirmed I'd found the right person.)
This collage doubles as a map of my niche cultural obsessions: Icelandic durational performance art, the title sequence of Jackie Brown, my go-to strength training music, nonfiction about “the oceanic depths of longing”, my favorite museum, a Norwegian movie I’d avoided watching for three years because I knew I would simultaneously love it and be emotionally destroyed by it. (I was right—and I also immediately planned a trip to Oslo, like a true sicko.)
Kiana and junior designer Ella Fall took this maximalist mess and created their own mood board in response to guide our first round of designs. My main directive was “colorful and sophisticated, but not like a fun house” and they crushed it: