Animal House meets Shakespeare—the concept behind this adaptation of Twelfth Night or What You Will was simple. It opened up a lot of opportunities for fun execution, a welcome change from the stereotypical formal image of other theater posters for Shakespeare’s plays.

In the initial stages of the concept process we did a lot of sketches, as well as a brief search for other poster/playbill combinations. Most of the existing posters for Twelfth Night were done in the traditional style—script style fonts with split or ambiguously gendered faces. Nearly every poster we found had some sort of human component. While several of our sketches had these elements, we wanted to take a more subtle approach. The goal was to imply the overarching gender identity and deception motifs in the play. But how to keep it accurate and still fun?

In the end we chose to use simple illustrations and typography that would capture the playfulness of the college scene. The beer cup illustrations that appear on both the poster and the playbill are easily identifiable as a part of the college party scene. Originally these had been part of a larger scale beer pong table with the cups arranged to create competing gender symbols. By using the beer cups we were able to evoke the Animal House image.

These more detailed images worked well on the poster, but we felt these drew too much attention away from the other content on the playbill cover. In order to adapt to the different scales and formats, we eliminated the complex gender symbols and substituted just two cups. The simple color change helped to retain the idea of gender. What you see before you is the final integration of these elements.­