The Ballet Conservatory
Logo Refresh | Branding | Website
project background
The Ballet Conservatory of South Texas is a non-profit ballet academy and pre-professional performance company serving San Antonio and surrounding areas. The organization promotes the development of serious young dancers ages 3 through 18, regardless of economic background, in a safe, nurturing and pre-professional dance company environment. The Ballet Conservatory approached Robot Creative for a logo refresh, branding and new website to help further build their presence in the community.
Research & Inspiration
With numerous options for dance schools in the city, The Ballet Conservatory needed their brand to communicate the quality of classical instruction and technical strength, but remain balanced with the warm and nurturing instructional philosophy. Competitive analysis was just a start. Inspirational research was also conducted to provide international role models and best-in-class examples from the fine arts space including museums, art galleries, professional ballet companies and more.
Logo Refresh & Brand Development
The Ballet Conservatory wanted to modernize their logo and also rework the original horizontal arrangement to create a condensed, more flexible shape. ROBOT explored different color palettes, ultimately staying with the existing base color to build off of their already-established brand equity while introducing a secondary color to help expand the brand and provide more visual depth.
Photography is a core component of the new brand with graphic elements intentionally minimized. Technical photography guidelines help strategically illustrate The Ballet Conservatory’s story through images of the staff, students and productions. The brand development also included voice and messaging guidelines to aide in communicating a goal-oriented, approachable tone.
“ROBOT’s collaborative process was a wonderful experience for our team. We continue to get compliments on the professionalism of our site and how easy it is to navigate. We attribute our increased site traffic and class registrations to the design and structure changes that Robot Creative recommended.”
Director of Development and Marketing
website
With a newly updated brand, efforts turned to the website. The planning stages of the project lead to a restructuring of the site to better serve three distinct audiences: current students/parents, prospective students/parents and community donors and supporters. In addition to the front-end usability concerns, another important goal was to develop an easy back-end maintenance plan for The Ballet Conservatory’s team to help keep the organization’s dynamic class schedules and information current.
Class Pages
With class options ranging from beginner to pre-professional, creating an organized overview of The School’s offerings was an important piece of the restructuring of the site. Custom, drop-down navigation creates an instant snapshot of class levels and individual pages provide details on skill level, class times and tuition.
Performances Page
The newly redesigned site lends more prominence to the Performances Page in the top level of navigation, and the format of the page makes it easy for community supporters to learn of upcoming events and ticket information.
