Bialystock & Bloom

This was actually one of the first fictional logos I did, way back in 2001, the year the musical version of The Producers opened on Broadway.

I've always loved the original movie (I literally have scars from laughing so hard at it; I watched it in the hospital four days after abdominal surgery and tore three stitches despite the pillow I held to my stomach the whole time.)When I heard about the musical, I decided I wanted a shirt, but not one that commemorated the stage play or film; what I wanted was the kind of shirt that members of the stage crew of Springtime for Hitler might wear. That's kind of what I go for with all these things; little scraps of reality from the fictional world.

For this design, I decided on a stark black & white design both because a tightwad like Max Bialystock would only spring for a one-color print, and also because the limitations of the time of the movie would have made a single color design optimal for everything from letterhead to rubber stampers.

The fonts are intended to evoke bygone eras, though only one of them is actually vintage. "Bialystock" is set in Rundfunk and "Bloom" is in Dolmen, two pseudo Art Deco fonts that Letraset came out with in the '70s. "Theatrical Producers" is in Bodega Sans Black Oldstyle, a retro-flavored typeface from 1990.  The "&" is Cooper Black, an authentic Jazz-era font from the 1920s.