Austin Improv

I was wondering who the girl is in the Hideout logo. Then I started wondering why Coldtowne uses a logo of boxers. Then I started wondering where the names of these places came from. And so on. What's the stories?

that's a super good question!

I half wondered about that when I whipped up this a long time ago for a possible event.



I wasn't sure it was a guy or lady. But most likely a lady right?

Yeah, looks like a little elfin girl.

From our website:

Gnap! Website wrote:Q. How do you pronounce Gnap!?
A. You pronounce the G–Guh-nap

Q. Guh-nap? What does that mean?
A. It’s a phrase from an old episode of the Smurfs, and before that the comic book Les Schtroumpfs Noir (The Black Smurfs) by Peyo.

Q. Uh, ok. Why the hell would you name a theater company that?
A. It’s a long, silly inside joke of a story, but bascially Artistic Director Shannon McCormick is a little obsessed with this episode of the Smurfs–it’s kind of kinky in a completely naive way, violent, aggressive, with a touch of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros and an unintetional commentary on the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. That such a cracked piece of pop culture was smuggled into living rooms all across America never ceases to amaze. We aspire to do work as sweetly subversive and innocently weird.

The origin of the bomb logo is a little longer, but our blue and purple color scheme is a nod to that episode of the Smurfs as well.

Gnap! is actually the only one that I knew Useful for those who don't, though.

The ColdTowne naming process involved a ton of liquor. In the end the two names we hated the least were ColdTowne and the Everyday Heroes.(Coldtown being the name of a city that Arthur Simone created in Sid Meyer's Civilization. In a fit of marketing genius I added the 'e' on it because it felt old timey.)

We compromised on the name "ColdTowne Heroes." We dropped the Heroes after moving to Austin due to confusion with the Heroes of Comedy. We kept the e on the end to make life more difficult for copy editors.

We argued back and forth about logos -- we knew we wanted a distinct stamp of somekind, like the UCB's 3d glasses. Something that looked cool, a little edgy and we could play around with graphically. It was less important to us to have a logo that reflected our content. We rationed that doing good shows would give an arbitrary symbol more meaning than picking something goofy.

We tossed around a lot of ideas that played on our New Orleans roots -- at one point, we considered a tank that shot Fluer De Lis, though I'm pretty sure that was a quip that someone took seriously.

I was fooling around with some old-timey clip art and making a flier. Someone -- I forget who -- walked past my room at ColdTowne Manor when I was laying out a flier with the boxers on it and said, "nice logo."

I was like, "Seriously?" I liked it, but we'd gone back and forth so much I didn't even think anyone would consider it.

There you have it. Our name and logo -- and the last 6 years of my life --is the product of nothing more than a lot of very intense crisis yes anding.

shando wrote: Q. Guh-nap? What does that mean?
A. It’s a phrase from an old episode of the Smurfs, and before that the comic book Les Schtroumpfs Noir (The Black Smurfs) by Peyo.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyjp5_uUuT8[/youtube]

Well, the Hideout is called that because it was the home base for The Heroes of Comedy / We Could Be Heroes... so it fits with the whole Superhero theme . The other name in the running according to Sean was "The Hippodrome", which featured a pretty awesome hippo in the hypothetical logo.



When Kareem and Jessica and I took over as owners, we knew we wanted to have a distinct logo / look for The Hideout. And working with Kaci we all decided that the overall look should be Art Nouveau in style. So I started pouring over old Art Nouveau posters for something to adapt for our logo. I kinda obsessed over it.

Here are some of the logos I toyed with:


That brocolli-haired lady in the top middle was the top contender for awhile. I messed around with a lot of variations of her:



But eventually I thought she looked a bit too pretentious. We ultimately settled on the stargazer (as we called her) because she was looking up... which implied that she was hopeful, and also our theater is upstairs.

So I mucked around with her for a bit:


Also, scandal! Here is the original painting by Maxfield Parrish that the logo is drawn from:


Live Nude Improv indeed.

Here's the final logo:


I'd like to thank Gmail for making this trip down memory lane possible.

Roy - How amazingly awesome. Great work.

Roy Janik wrote:...and also our theater is upstairs.

heh.

Roy: I like that you opted to go with a slightly softer outline around the girls face rather than the sharp angle that appeared around her nose with what I assume was the default 'stroke' effect.

B. Tribe wrote:Roy: I like that you opted to go with a slightly softer outline around the girls face rather than the sharp angle that appeared around her nose with what I assume was the default 'stroke' effect.

I think I had this idea of trying to make her look like she was cut out of a piece of paper... but yeah, it didn't really work.

Roy, thanks for posting all those. I always find it nice to get some insight into other people's creative process.

In a fit of marketing genius I added the 'e' on it because it felt old timey.

And here I thought the 'e' on the end was in homage to the 'e' at the end of Arthur Simone.

Terry wrote:

In a fit of marketing genius I added the 'e' on it because it felt old timey.

And here I thought the 'e' on the end was in homage to the 'e' at the end of Arthur Simone.

actually, it used to be Arthur Simonee...that's where they got the extra e from in the first place...