FollowSpot
Client / Organization
Goal
Role
A “follow spot” is a another term for a spotlight that is trained on a performer whilst on stage. It is often employed as a visual cue to draw an audience’s attention to what is unfolding in the scene. In the same sense, then, Tisch Drama’s FollowSpot has for many years served as an insider guide to the prestigious acting conservatory. It gives industry professionals and potential students a glimpse of the creativity and current events happening at Drama.
When I joined the department, my responsibilities included managing the annual production of this e-zine as the design lead. Working together with an editorial team, we produced an entirely re-branded collection, delivering more personal stories that showed why Tisch Drama continues to be a leader in actor training.
Challenge
How can we create a modern and compelling publication that captured the culture and innovation of Tisch Drama?
01.
Identity refresh
Previous iterations of FollowSpot offered general recruitment information and important dates, as well as highlights from the academic year. Unfortunately, the visual and editorial quality lacked a polished appeal and didn’t connect with new generations of college-bound students and aspiring theater artists. This created challenges in an increasingly competitive space. My first task was to devise a thorough rebrand of the newsletter to reflect the culture and experience at Tisch Drama as a leader of performance education and highlight the creativity existing throughout our conservatory and larger global NYU community.
Using inspiration from NYU’s existing branding, I designed several series of FollowSpot with exciting new stories that shed light on various parts of the community and the variety of learning opportunities unique to Tisch Drama. Our editorial approach focused on how Tisch Drama nurtures artistic growth, while providing a more personal view of NYU’s culture and global community.
02.
Interactive Storytelling
As a niche project historically delivered as as a .pdf, there was no associated multimedia content related to FollowSpot. Taking on this role, I advocated for inclusion of additional layers of interactivity and opportunities to take storytelling beyond the document. Publishing a digital interactive version and hosting through existing ezine platform issuu.com allowed us to link out from our PDFs. This empowered the entire department to produce a variety of media and sharing it with our readers.
Results
While the scope of our FollowSpot audience continues to remain relatively small, our ambition in sharing the magic of Tisch Drama has only grown since the rebranding. The publication joins a collection of recruiting material developed and launched by Tisch Drama’s office of Special Projects, in collaboration with Communications and Admissions groups. Collectively, these efforts have led to a year over year increase in applicants.
