Designing the BAM Identity

Following World War II, American graphic designers were inspired by European modernism, refracted through a New World lens. BAM was no exception. Programs from this era featured Bauhaus typefaces like Futura, designed by Paul Renner. Playful mix-and-match typography gives these pieces an informal feel, while demonstrating an awareness of new trends.

Perhaps inspired by the arched windows on the front of the Peter Jay Sharp Building, this logo endured at varying levels of prominence until 1995. It still shows up unexpectedly throughout the BAM campus,

The Next Wave festival began in 1983 as a showcase of bold, pathbreaking work, and with it a logo (designed by Valerie Pettis for Doublespace) with horizontal lines that merge positive and negative space. A decade later, these stripes inspired BAM’s 1995 Next Wave redesign. The Next Wave also initiated a series of collaborations with New York visual artists, including posters featuring art by Roy Lichtenstein, Keith Haring, Alex Katz, Richard Avedon, and many more.

"I was inspired by the legendary midcentury advertising art director Helmut Krone. “I’ve spent my whole life fighting logos,” he once said. “A logo says, ‘I am an ad. Turn the page.’” Instead, he created indelible identities for his clients by making distinctive choices and deploying them relentlessly, most famously on behalf of Volkswagen, still using the combination of Futura and white space that he introduced in his “Think small” ad in 1959.So I hit on the idea of using one typeface, workhorse News Gothic, but with a twist: we would cut the type off, as if it couldn’t fit in the frame. As I explained to Harvey and his colleagues Karen Brooks Hopkins and Joe Melillo, this suggested that BAM crossed borders and couldn’t be contained on a single stage. But it was economical, too, allowing us to use four-inch-tall letters in two inches worth of space. It was like seeing King Kong’s eye in your bedroom window, I explained. Even if you couldn’t see the whole beast, you knew it was big." —excerpted from Michael Bierut’s How to Use Graphic Design to Sell Things, Explain Things, Make Things Look Better, Make People Laugh, Make People Cry, and (Every Once in a While) Change the World, Harper Collins: 2015

The early days of the BAM design aesthetic coincided with the early days of the internet. Much of the world was still trying to figure out how best to use this new medium—for BAM it meant a place to list events, describe our mission, post contact information, and offer information superhighway drivers a “bulletin board.” Online ticket sales wouldn’t happen for another ten years.

A new venue, and a new take on the BAM style. With the opening of BAM Rose Cinemas in 1999, a separate but connected identity was designed for BAM’s expanded film programming. The cornerstone of this plan was the bimonthly calendar. This bible for BAM cinéphiles has been published without interruption ever since, and while it underwent a format shift in 2012, the core of the design remains.

By its sixth year, BAMcinemaFest had grown into one of the primary New York presenters of high-profile film premieres. To celebrate its growing status, designer Katie Positerry reimagined the BAM typeface, News Gothic. The letterforms reference a neon sign, creating a typographic metaphor for projected light. A shifting circle, when animated, also becomes a spotlight illuminating hidden forms.

With the opening of the BAM Fisher and continually expanding programming for children and families, BAM committed to creating a new sub-brand. BAMkids takes the hallmarks of the BAM visual identity, and adds a secondary kid-friendly typeface called Frankfurter. Children of BAM staff and friends served as models.

At BAM, it’s not uncommon for the seed of a design to originate in print and only later be adapted to video. But for Migrating Forms, a boundary-pushing film and video festival, that model was turned on its head. Ideas were passed back and forth between print and video, each informing the other. As with BAMcinemaFest, BAM’s typeface was completely reimagined into an ever-changing animated system, creating the illusion of motion and depth. It maintains legibility while flirting with obfuscation and formal abstraction. It also echos the festival’s hard-to-pin-down programming with an identity that is always in flux.