Explore the gallery Collaborations S.F. Symphony x COLLINS Our relationship with the San Francisco creative community goes back over thirty years. In that time, we’ve partnered with civic organizations, museums, and institutions, working together to reflect the city’s inventive spirit. So when the San Francisco Symphony invited us to collaborate on its next chapter, we were thrilled.
As its famed maverick Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas closed out his extraordinary 25-year tenure, the organization began laying the groundwork for reinvention. It was transforming its programming approach, subverting hierarchical norms within both itself and the industry through a DEI-focused overhaul, and—in a move that stunned the global music community—passed the baton to visionary conductor and composer Esa–Pekka Salonen.
Salonen’s relentless drive to reposition classical music for the 21st century aligned perfectly with everything San Francisco and the Symphony stand for.
Together, they began to create an experimental blueprint for the future of orchestral music, built on a groundbreaking new artistic leadership model: eight collaborative partners from a variety of cultural disciplines, including Bryce Dessner of The National, AI entrepreneur Carol Reiley, bassist Esperanza Spalding, classical vocalist Julia Bullock, experimental flutist Claire Chase, violinist Pekka Kuusisto, and composer/pianist Nicholas Britell.
COLLINS was invited to help clarify, define, and express this bold new vision—and to help reassert classical music as a vital, global contemporary art form, all while staying rooted in the Bay Area community that made the Symphony so successful for over a century.
A Typographic System That Listens Music is one of humanity’s most powerful creations, meeting us at our emotional core. Like all great art, it both inspires and reflects the time we live in. But classical music suffers from a long-standing PR problem: it’s too often perceived as unchanging, elitist, and rooted in the past.
We began by collaborating with Symphony musicians, audiences, staff, executive leadership, and board members to define a shared vision for the future—one that would become our foundation for creative and design experimentation.
As the Symphony pushes into emerging technologies, our work lives at the intersection of digital, sonic, and typographic innovation. We designed an evolving, responsive visual system that brings the dynamic nature of classical music to life. Beginning with traditional typography—grounded in the art form’s heritage—we used variable font technology to introduce a contemporary twist: each letterform can change shape in real time based on sound and music.
We paired this with a more expressive voice—juxtaposing the timeless clarity of black and white with a vibrant palette inspired by the unique landscape of the Bay Area.
The result evokes the emotional range of symphonic music across a constantly shifting digital canvas.
The motion language borrows from musical structure: visuals build like crescendos, pause like rests, and transition like key changes. This dynamic behavior extends across social, video, apps, and live performance—creating a brand that’s not just seen, but felt.
Classical Form. Contemporary Voice. We grounded the system in black and white, an intentional nod to symphonic tradition. But we layered in a modular color palette inspired by Bay Area textures: fog, concrete, redwood, gold, and Pacific blue. More than accents, these hues shift with season, programming, and tone.
The result is a system that can be restrained or expressive, formal or experimental, without falling back on classical music clichés.
We’ve been honored to work with the multi-talented teams at the San Francisco Symphony. Together, we hope to have crafted an identity that helps classical music step boldly—and visibly—into its next movement.
Credits Louis Mikolay
Erik Berger Vaage
Sidney Lim
Karin Fyhrie
Christine Takaichi
Ben Crick
Tomas Markevicius
Michael Taylor
Yeun Kim
Mackenzie Pringle
Eric Park
Neil Jackson
Ivan Cruz
Paul Jun
Brian Collins
DINAMO
San Francisco Symphony
