thonik makes Phion Symphony Orchestra’s identity move with the music — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Where many orchestras have the recognition of a permanent venue, the Phion Symphony Orchestra moves from city to city and programme to programme. Recognition needed to come from somewhere other than architecture. Amsterdam-based studio thonik, brought in for strategic direction, identity, website and campaigns, found the answer in typography.

The decision came from a clear-eyed reading of who Phion wanted to be seen by. “The brief was clear. They wanted to reach the audience every cultural organisation is chasing: the creative omnivore,” explains Falco van Burg, Design Lead. Photography was the obvious route, and the one that many cultural organisations take, but it failed the test for thonik. “A photo of a musician doesn’t say much to us. What they play does.” That decision sent the studio toward letterforms as the carrier, and toward a typeface that could behave like the music. thonik also reworked the name, settling on Orkest Phion for home audiences and Phion Symphony Orchestra abroad.

They chose GT Planar from Grilli Type, a typeface whose character emerges through movement. “GT Planar has details that only appear when you slant it,” van Burg tells us. “The moment the type tilts, extra forms come out that emphasise its character, and you can feel the typographer knew exactly how it should move.” Tilt it, and the conductor’s baton suggests itself. A baton shapes the air and draws the dynamics out of an orchestra, and the typeface, adapted by thonik to bend left and right as they wanted, does the same across a poster: slowing, accelerating, opening and tightening. In motion, it moves with the rhythm of the piece it carries, kinetic where the music is kinetic and still where the music is still.

Each concert title is composed uniquely, closer to a magazine spread than a brand campaign. “It always starts with the music, not the layout,” van Burg says. “Before we design anything, we ask what the piece feels like. Calm or restless? Does it build slowly or hit you right away? That feeling is what we translate, not the information.” A restless piece bends the letters hard and breaks the word apart. A calm piece stays open and quiet. There is no master template waiting for the next programme.

Stravinsky is the perfect example of the system at full stretch. His music is fractured and irregular, the rhythm jumping, the accents landing where the ear doesn’t expect them, holding a tension between beautiful and harsh. thonik broke the name into three parts, set off one line at different heights and angles so the eye reads it in pieces instead of as one smooth word. “The ‘S’ is the soft, flowing side. The ‘y’ cuts down hard and sharp, the brutal side,” van Burg explains. “Same name, but it holds both.” A composer like Mahler takes the same system the other way - it’s broader, slower and more open.

The logo, the typeface and the grid stay fixed; all the expression sits in the titles. One rule binds them: every title opens with a large character, a kind of drop cap that marks the start of the piece, usually in lowercase. “Uppercase is stricter and sharper, lowercase lets us show the roundness and curves we want,” van Burg notes. Matching the dominant colour of the lettering to the photography adds another thread of continuity, and across a season, the posters accumulate into a coherent system.

The studio makes several versions of every title, so choosing the right one is as difficult as the design itself. “Some go too far, too loose, too improvised, and start to feel like jazz instead of a symphony orchestra,” van Burg reveals. “That was our limit. However energetic a title gets, it still has to feel composed, not improvised.”

“We wanted to avoid the idea that an orchestra is about classical music, and instead emphasise the timelessness of great composition, in music and in type,” he explains, referencing the work of Piet Zwart, Wim Crouwel, Wolfgang Weingart and Experimental Jetset. Their work feels timeless decades on. “The music isn’t outdated, so the identity shouldn’t look outdated either,” van Burg adds.