Playbill Design Throughout History

Quinn: Hello and welcome back to Pictorial on Relay FM. I'm Quinn Rose, and I did not go to art school, but I still love learning about art and graphic design.

Betty: Hi, and I’m Betty. I also didn't go to art school, but as I've mentioned previously, I did go to design school. So I feel like while this topic today is something currently I can say I know nothing about, but I feel like I could have some sort of input.

Quinn: The last couple of episodes have kind of accidentally been this pattern where one of us is bringing a lot of knowledge to the table when the other person knows very little about it, if anything, as demonstrated in the last episode, and we've been really enjoying that format. So we're going to continue that for a little while, let us know what you think, if you have any thoughts. But we're going to do some back and forth, just bringing each other topics. And they're not all going to be things that we just like are super passionate about. Like sometimes they're just going to be like, oh, we're interested in this thing, so we did a bunch of research in it. But we also made a joke in the last episode about me bringing a theater topic and hello, it's happening. Today we are talking about the graphic design of playbills. Because for anyone who doesn't know, I really love musical theater. Like, watching and talking about musical theater is probably my primary hobby. I have another podcast that is all about musicals. I am a huge nerd. So I thought this would be a really fun thing to cover today.

Betty: I do have a stupid question to begin with.

Quinn: Yes.

Betty: Are we just talking about Broadway or other musical theater or other play productions? I mean, it doesn't really matter because we're talking about the design, but I guess I don't even know what it is.

Quinn: Betty, I am so glad you asked. That is such a good question. So there are a couple of distinctions in the kind of thing that I'm talking about. The word “playbill” is very often used at least in the United States, and I think Canada as well, to sort of ubiquitously mean the theater program. The thing that you get handed when you walk into the theater, that's the playbill. However, Playbill is a brand name. It is a company. It just happens to be like, the most successful company for theater programs. So every Broadway show has a playbill. Playbill is the company that sources the programs for every show on Broadway. And a lot of theaters across the United States have officially licensed playbills. And that means that their playbills adhere to the standardized playbill design, which we will get into. And they're sort of these officially licensed things. However, that is not the end all be all of theater programs. You can just make a theater program. No one owns that idea. Your particular theater might have a certain kind of style of design that they sort of have a standardized design for a specific theater, but like, anything that's Broadway or any sort of official tours that, you know, like Broadway in Chicago is its own kind of ecosystem that is officially licensed out of Broadway, they all have officially licensed playbills. So it's that kind of thing. You can also, fun fact, like design a quote unquote, “official playbill” for your local production of whatever. Like you can do it through the playbill company and get an official playbill for it, which is pretty cool. I don't know how much that costs, but I know that it is an option. Special mention as well to the programs in the United Kingdom. I, again, don't know how this is done commonly in other countries. But I know that in the UK, at least, programs are a different kind of thing. Instead of being the sort of like relatively flimsy thing you get handed for free when you enter the theater, it is a much more substantial, larger booklet that does cost money.

Betty: I kind of, I feel like that sounds more like an art catalog. Like sometimes when you go see an art show at an, or even not, it doesn't have to be art, some show at an art gallery or museum, you could either be handed like a pamphlet, just explaining the show, or you can buy the exhibition catalog, which is like a book which has essays and, you know, talks about the show and it's written by the curator and stuff like that. Is that kind of the difference? I mean, it's obviously not exactly.

Quinn: There are some similarities. So the standard official playbill has all of the information about the specific show. It's going to have like everyone in the cast, all of their bios, some background on the show, all the songs that are in it when we're talking about musicals, which I am—I'm not talking about plays, sorry. They also have playbills, I don't care about them. Anyway, playbill as the officially licensed thing also exists, like as a magazine, they just produce original content about theater. And so you can buy the playbill magazine just like by itself. But also like articles from that magazine that gets regularly rotated out of content, articles from that also come in every Broadway show program. So, you know, there'll be all the stuff about the musical, but there'll also be articles about like interesting shows on Broadway right now, or like a deep dive interview with a producer, like stuff like that is also in there. That's typically not going to stuff, like if you just have an independent theater or just like a local show or whatever, like it's typically just going to be the songs and the cast information. It's not going to be all this other stuff that belongs in the playbill. And then the West End versions that—like I said, they're larger, they're on higher quality paper. They have higher quality images and stuff like that of the show. So it's not a coffee table book—like they're only a couple dollars, don't get too excited, but they're somewhat more adjacent to that style and that like, they tend to have like these large, full color photos instead of having like this thin flimsy—like receipt paper that playbills are made out of.

Betty: So do you have, like, do you have a collection—or do you like collect them and have a, have just a pile of them, of the shows you've seen?

Quinn: Thank you for asking. Yes, I do. I keep—I have kept every playbill from every show I've ever seen. This is extremely common. Some people leave their playbills behind, I don't know what they're doing, but like a lot of people who consider themselves sort of like theater fans and nerds will keep every playbill they get. And also, almost every time you see a show, there's going to be a little paper insert that says like who's actually on that day. Cause you know, there's like understudies and swings and whatever. So you gotta keep that paper to know who you actually saw. And then people often—they either collect them and if you do it properly, you like get a binder with archival storage levels kind of things. And if you're me slash the other gay teenagers—I'm 24—you use them as decorations. So my office actually has an entire playbill wall. So where I'm sitting right now, I'm facing my whiteboard, but behind me and which is my background for zoom calls is, a framed—is almost every playbill I've ever gotten in a frame creating this giant collage.

Betty: I feel so inadequate now. Cause I'm like, you know, I do sound like the person who would collect the pamphlet from every art exhibition I've seen, and then will plaster that all over my wall. But because I've moved so many times in my life, I threw most of that out, but I think I'm going to start keeping them now.

Quinn: I want to get into a little bit of the history of the playbill, and this is where while there are all sorts of types of theater programs—and in fact, some of my favorite theater programs on my wall are ones that are not official playbills which I'll get into kind of why I think that is in a minute, but I do want to focus kind of specifically on the Broadway playbill, just because they are their own institution and the image that's on the Broadway playbill is generally going to be the design that kind of carries through the show. That's going to be the design on their marquee and their cast album and like all of this kind of stuff. And so it—even though the playbill may vary from like different productions or whatever, like kind of the one that's on the original Broadway playbill is going to be the iconic image, the iconic branding of the show, which makes it really important. So all that being said, let's get into just a little brief history of playbills because it is kind of fun. The history of Broadway is kind of weird and amorphous. But generally speaking when you look at sort of like, the late 1800s, early 1900s, Broadway quote-unquote theater in New York, there was no standardization whatsoever. People just did whatever they wanted. That was true in all ways. Until the 1920s things started to get standardized a little in that they kind of designed an artwork for each theater. And that was just the cover of every playbill. So you got handed this—and it wasn't even called a playbill then. But you got handed your theater program and it was like, this is the Winter Garden Theater artwork, and it didn't have anything to do with the show you were about to see.

Betty: So it wouldn't be like a drawing or illustration of a show. It's actually just a drawing for the actual theater.

Quinn: Correct. There was no differentiation between different shows at that time.

Betty: Oh, okay. That's interesting.

Quinn: Not as much fun as a collector's item. But they didn't have Instagram back then, so, okay. In the 1930s, the company as Playbill properly was founded. It was actually, they wrote “the playbill” on their programs back then. And they also started doing this design style, which persisted for decades, which was having like sepia tones most commonly, or black and white for the cover artwork. But honestly the design was still very not standardized. There were like lots of different fonts, lots of different placement of, of theater and show title and the, the words, “the playbill,” it was all over the place. It wasn't actually standardized at all until the 1950s. And then they came up with this design where sort of the top header of the actual playbill was used for the standard information. On the top left, there was a little square that had the name of the theater. And then the rest of that top header was taken up with “Playbill” on usually a yellow background. The yellow has been pretty consistent for playbills. Sometimes shows use different colors, but it was mostly the yellow background.

Betty: I feel like that's familiar. So yeah, when, when I—I obviously briefly Googled playbill just before and I'm like, yes, I recognize this, even though I have never seen a Broadway show.

Quinn: Yes, it's very distinctive. And that is getting—that honestly, even in the 1950s, it was pretty close to how it still is today, but it didn't get to the modern playbill design until the 1970s. In 1973, I didn't know about this, and I'm so sad that it went away—for like less than a full year, they use multicolor headers. So they changed it so the header went all—the color header part of it went all the way across the top of the design and it had pink, orange, and yellow. So fun. But then they were like, no. So by 1974, they then created the standard playbill that was the playbill design until 2016. Which was, you had the solid yellow header that said playbill and then the name of the theater. And then there was this white outline that went around that and around the edges of the entire thing. And then below that was the design of the show, whatever the show’s logo design, all that good stuff is.

Betty: Is there a Pantone for that yellow that it has to be—there probably is. And if so, do you know what it is?

Quinn: I don't know what it is off the top of my head. I know that there is one though. Like it is a standard yellow that is the playbill yellow.

Betty: Okay. That's—usually when you have like brand guidelines or a standard, whether it's for a playbill design or if it's for like really any designer, especially for logos, for something that you would reproduce over and over, you would almost always have Pantone codes. They're actually called PMS codes, which stands for like Pantone something something… I don't, we just said PMS, cause it's great to say. And it will be like a number, it'll be like, this is Pantone like 673C or something. And this way that when you go to a printer, like you don't have to—they can just go look up like what that is, and then they'll match it. Instead of having to show up literally with a paint swatch from like Benjamin Moore and say “this is the yellow I want.” But, you know, it could be inconsistent because displays on like screens, even different printers print different CMYK and RGB colors differently. Anyway, won't go too much into that because that's an episode in itself, but that's why I asked that question.

Quinn: But yeah, there is very specific playbill branding. And like I was talking about earlier with having officially licensed playbills at different theaters across the country. So like I have gone to see a lot of shows in Boston and Chicago that are like official Broadway tours. And if you look at the playbills, there is no difference between those ones and the Broadway ones. It has, I mean, it's just, it's the word Playbill with its official font on its official color header. The name of the theater, which obviously is, they're all different theaters. And then the, the show image underneath, but like, there is no design element of the actual playbill that is different between a Broadway show and a Broadway tour.

Betty: I just Googled—I just am, in my results I see there's a playbill for Wicked where the top is green. Is this because it's before this 2016 where it has to be like one color or do they do like special things for special shows.

Quinn: Thank you for asking. So they do have some special additions. Usually these are going to be for special anniversaries. So the green Wicked playbill was for the fifth anniversary of Wicked. And there have been some stuff like that. There've been a few other changes of playbills throughout the year. The biggest one here is that in 2015, they started doing some redesigns to the actual playbill, the standard playbill design itself. Just a couple of shows of 2015 like for example, Shuffle Along had this design change where they basically just took out the outline. So the show design and the header just went all the way to the edges of the playbill cover. And then in 2016 they rolled that out design wide. So every playbill since 2016 has that now where there is no outline and it's just this like fully clean, no edges look to the playbill. There's some special edition playbills that happen for like major shows’ anniversaries. And ever since 2014, they have been doing pride playbills. So for the month—they started in 2014, like I said, and for the month of June, every playbill has a pride header instead of the standard yellow header. So this is for pride month which is in June of every year. And it started out with the pride colors, which is a six toned rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. And it started out with these blocks that went vertically across. They then transitioned, I think, in 2018… Yeah, 2018. into a rainbow gradient instead of having those distinct boxes. And then in 2019, they actually had the pridebill, as it's known, on like a brick design, which I believe was to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. Tragically, have not been any pridebills since then, because they did close Broadway. But I think when they come back, there'll be going back to the gradient design.

Betty: See I really prefer personally, just from a design standpoint, the blocky, like it going, going from one color to the other, the six blocks, as opposed to the gradient. I just feel like the gradient, it reminds me of like an early internet flash website or something like that. Or just, I just don't like gradients in general. I just feel like it has to be done really well for it to look good. It just, in my opinion. But so again, like within design, there's like so many different opinions. Somebody could like a color and not like a color, but the reason why sometimes you make one decision over the other could be because it evokes something that is, that seems out of place. And then you try not to do that. And that would be a reason why I would personally have stayed with like, just the blocks of color. But, you know, that's some people probably like the gradient more. When it comes to changing from the outline to not having an outline, this does seem quite significant because again, like I, you know, I just heard of this history now and I was just looking at two—or I'm just looking side by side of there being an outline and there not having an outline for the design and yeah, it does seem like this, like clean, just like a block of color with like an image, like without there being outlines, is kind of on brand with contemporary graphic design, I guess is what I'll say is. Cause if you think about like, Apple logos and like iOS or a logo design, or really just any like design of websites. Like currently it just does seem like, you know, just very minimalistic, very… just blocky colors and just trying to not have these things like outlines and stuff to, to give any more, I guess like, just to be any less minimal, basically, or any more minimal. I don't even know. Anyway, minimalism seems to be where a lot of design directions are going. And I obviously, that's not going to be the case all the time, but that does make sense why I think they took out that outline in this time, because it does seem like, yeah. Basically everybody's taking out like outlines and borders and stuff like that.

Quinn: Yeah. I find that such a fascinating aspect of this because it's, I completely agree with you that it both seems to be pointing towards a more modern minimalist design sense, but also is historically inspired by the way that playbills looked in the 1960s where they also didn't have the outlines back then. So I think it kind of points to the cyclical-ness of design and design trends. I want to get into some specific playbill designs to give you some examples, because we have been talking so far just about the design of like, playbill as a standard Broadway wide thing. And I want to take a look at what shows have done for their specific designs. So we are going to start out with basically the kind of like platonic ideal of playbills, which is the Hamilton playbill. Even if you don't know anything about theater, you've probably see this. It is the black star in which the top point of the star is the silhouette of Hamilton with his arm pointing one finger in the air. And it's on this sort of gold textured background. In the middle that says “Hamilton: An American musical.” I think that this playbill functions really well, I think it works really well as a logo for the, for the show. It's instantly iconic. It's very recognizable. It's very easy to kind of recreate and slap onto merchandise and all that kind of stuff that you want a logo to be able to do for you. It’s not my favorite playbill from an artistic standpoint. Although I think it's fine, I think it's like middle of the road. But I do think that like, from a graphic design standpoint it functions really well. And I also just want to throw in here before I get your thoughts on this, is that when I sat down to think about this episode, I realized how bad a lot of playbills are. Just like a lot of them are so boring or so bland, or they like, they're just not very good. And it really took me a while to sit down and think about like, what are playbill designs that I actually really like, and not just like, think are fine. So we are going to cover some of those later, but boy, it was funny to realize that.

Betty: You know what's funny. I actually, when it comes to criticizing art or judging art, I'm actually usually not harsh on anything. Cause I feel like even if, again, even if it's art that I don't like, there's still something interesting and it is much more subjective. But when it comes to design, I can be very harsh. So I can totally just look—like I think this came up a bit during flags as well. I just look at pretty much every American flag—American state flag, also even the American national flag, and say, yeah, most of this is terrible. But there are always some good ones.

Quinn: And like I said, the playful design has to function in so many different ways and have so many different purposes that I get why a lot of them end up being like, playing it very safe or just not being very interesting. But yeah it's rough out there. So what do you think of the Hamilton design?

Betty: I do think, yeah, when it comes to effectiveness, when it comes to being iconic, it definitely did its job. Because I have never seen Hamilton because I am Canadian and I don't think—I think it was coming here or, sorry, it did come here eventually, but I didn't end up seeing it cause it was sold out very quickly, I'm pretty sure. I would like to see it, if it, you know, comes back after this COVID thing. But yeah, like it is very recognizable and I think partially to do with the minimal nature of it, that it is really just a star with, you know, a person as the top star pointing up. And it is sitting on, I am wondering, what is this texture in the background, if we know? Is that like a wall that, or is that bronze or whatever, it's just texture. Is there any symbolic nature to this to this background?

Quinn: Honestly, I've never really thought about it. Now I'm worried if I'm dumb and I'm missing something really obvious that I don't remember from the show that points to what this is, but I've always just thought of it as sort of like the color scheme of the show of like, gold and black and just being like a nice texture that sort of like reminiscent of like an older substance, it looks aged.

Betty: Yeah, that's probably what it is. And that's kind of what I was going to say. It gives it, so if it was like completely minimalism, whereas like this background is just like, you know, a gray or like a brown or whatever, it would be too much. It would be too much minimalism.

Quinn: It would look terrible if it was a solid color background.

Betty: Yeah, exactly. It would then look like a flag, which is it isn't and I think again, just by introducing this like subtle, this is a bit of a rustic looking background, but it's not like it's like a literal brick wall, it instantly, like kind of evokes “okay, this is like an older story.” This is not, it's not some contemporary person named Hamilton or, I mean, again, I haven't seen this show. For all I know it could be so, but I'm assuming this at least has something to do with the Hamilton from a long time ago.

Quinn: That is correct.

Betty: Perfect.

Quinn: Okay. I'm going to show you a few more and I think as we go from now, I'm just going to send you these and I would like you to describe them briefly and then tell me what you think.

Betty: Okay. So I am looking at another one, another playbill. So this is one without the border. So I'm assuming this is one of the ones after like, 2018, it was that you said.

Quinn: Yes, this is a, this is a very recent design.

Betty: Okay. So it is, so again, the yellow playbill at the top, and then the bottom part it says Sunday in the Park With George and it is all in caps, but in a slightly Saraf... or maybe old, older looking, I'm not even sure font. And the, the text is smudged as if like somebody wrote it in ink and, and smudged it. And then there is a swoop of a paint swoop. It’s blue as well as a little bit of yellow orange on a white background, but there are some like smudginess, so it, it really just looks like it's a painted “Sunday in the Park With George” with some paint swoops.

Quinn: I love hearing your description about these. I'm assuming you also don't know what the show is about.

Betty: No idea.

Quinn: Do you have a guess?

Betty: Is it—well, is it Sunday in the Park with the George who, whose last French last name I always butcher, so I'm not going to say but the person who painted La Grande Jatte?

Quinn: Sure is, baby! George Seurat. This is, this is the show that was inspired by that painting.

Betty: Great. See, I know some stuff. Okay. Well, so I had before even like, thinking about this, I thought, okay, this is probably about some art or some painting related show just by looking at the context. But I will say this Sunday in the Park With George is a bit hard to read. And like making a decision to, to then with the smudging on the, on the text, I think is a good idea on brand, but it is even more hard to read.

Quinn: That's my thing about this one. I loved this for an artistic piece. Like I think this is one of the most beautiful playbill designs I've ever seen. But I don't think it works as well as like a piece of graphic design branding, just because it's, it's not as distinctive. It is a little bit harder to read. And so I think it falls, I have—like no notes because I do love it. But I do admit that like in the balance between sort of branding design and like artistic choices, it falls very far on the artistic side of things.

Betty: Yeah. Well, so, and I think this is why I'm like, I don't really critique art because it, you know, it depends on what you're trying to do with the art, but in very often it's like, well, the art does whatever you want it to do, but whereas design or a specifically graphic design or playbills, there is an additional function, which is to, like, I'm assuming get people interested in this show. So there needs to be some sort of eye-catchiness or, iconic-ness, or just being able to read well and easily-ness, which just doesn't really do. But yeah, like from, from an artistic point of view, it is really beautiful. And I do like, again, I don't know if it's just because this is like totally the thing everybody does now, is I do like that there isn't a border and this looks, honestly, it looks like a magazine. It looks like a magazine cover. So as a magazine cover again, it could be better cause magazine covers also need to be eye-catching. But it is, it does look pretty nice if it was one.

Quinn: Well, speaking of being more eye catching and clear, here is another design that is also very recent and has that no border playbill.

Betty: This is a playbill. The bottom part is black and white and red. It seems to be, it seems to be a black and white photo of a person's hand holding some sort of flower, but the flower is red. And then the text on the bottom, it's either “Hades [pronounced haeds] town” or “Hades [pronounced hae-dees] town”

Quinn: It’s Hades [hae-dees] town.

Betty: Oh, perfect. Okay. Great. Pronounced it right the second time. So the “Hades” is in white and the “town” is in red and again, the Hadestown are in big block colors.

Quinn: So what do you think of this one and its design choices?

Betty: Definitely easier to read. The Hadestown is pops right from, from the black background, the like white, obviously that's the biggest contrast you can have with a background is black and white. And then the red is like always popping out because that's the nature of that color, intensity wise. And then so, but then, yeah, so this is kind of great because it is minimal because it's just, it's a very simple photo of someone's hand with a flower, but it's not minimalism in terms of, this is like super contemporary looking minimalism, because it does look—the black and white photo, and then I think—this is a picture of a playbill, so I think there is some texture on the black, unless this is something you like rubbed a lot and it's come this way. But I'm, I'm going to assume that like, there is some meaning to evoke this, something to do with the underworld, I'm going to assume because it's Hades, but who knows.

Quinn: I love everything that you got from this, because Hadestown is a steam punk retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth myth. So this whole kind of having this old style, like black and white aesthetic is like very in tune with the content and the vibe of this show. So I love that it came through in the playbill. I actually haven't seen this show which I'm really sad about. Don't talk to me. But I'm a big fan of the playbill and especially I think—the red flower is very much the symbol of this show and I think it works so well, like very similar to wait at the Hamilton black star on gold works very well as an icon. Like the red flower on black, I think is so easy to recreate and become this icon for the show.

Betty: So when do we go see this show together?

Quinn: Any day it's back, any day. Okay, I'm going to finish this out today with one last playbill design that I want you to respond to. We are going to go back to the outline versions here. And tell me what you think of this.

Betty: Interesting. So we're looking at one of the ones with the outlines and the bottom portion is a black and white image of a man, or I assume, is a silhouetted person that's wearing all black with their hand pointing at the camera, I guess. And so you just see this hand of someone pointing at you and at the bottom, it says “assassins” in big block letters. And in the background, is this… are there, they're dots, but it looks like it's lights. Anyway, it's a grid of dots. And then the “Assassins” actually has a bit of a gradient on it. So it's not entirely white letters. There's a bit of a gray gradient on it and it looks quite menacing. I'm assuming this is a show about assassins.

Quinn: So, yes. I had to show you this because I hate it so much. This is an amazing show called Assassins, that's a Sondheim show—I had two different Sondheim playbills on here, a good one and a bad one. Balance. Anyway, but it's about assassins and attempted assassins throughout United States history—of US presidents. The show's very good. This production in particular was amazing. I don't know who did this and why, I'm sorry if you are, or know the person who did this, but it was just horrifying. I'm also gonna send you right now—they had the black and white version on the playbill, but the cast recording had the color version, and it's just, it's red and yellow and it's even worse.

Betty: Oh my God. Oh my God.

Quinn: It's supposed to be, he's also, it's a guy, he's supposed to be doing a finger gun at the camera. I don't know why though. I don't know why.

Betty: Yeah. The colored version is much worse even though, even though it's… So I'm glad the black and white version made it to this playbill. But yeah. Well I kind of, I kind of already went through why I hate gradients, so we don't have to go, we don't have to go down that anymore, but this actually‑so this reminds me of YouTube thumbnail design, which I was going to bring up earlier, but this is even better time. This is another thing where you want to have like a nice thumbnail for your YouTube video so that people will, you know, first of all, so that looks good. And a lot of YouTubers will brand their thumbnail so it always has a similar way or their logo always appears to the side. Mine, all of my thumbnails have a green border for the Articulations green. That's kind of like my subtle branding. And so yeah, so you want to have like a nice design and so, but with that, you also want it to be eye catching because you want people to click on your video and watch it. But obviously you don't want to be clickbait. You don't want to just put like large boobs or like, you know, even if you talk about boobs in your video, you probably don't want to just do that. And you don't just want to have like some person screaming, which is what a lot of clickbaity thumbnails, like, you know, that's what they do. And giant letters flying all over the place. I mean, because it just, I mean, you can still do that and there are channels who do do that, and that is kind of the schtick they're going for. It's like, we're crazy. And we're doing these like, whatever things, but especially if you're not doing that type of content, like you don't really want to do that, but a lot of people still do do that. And this is a prime example of this is someone trying too hard to be clickbaity. And I don't think it works.

Quinn: Honestly, there are a lot of very good comparisons to make there. The image of the show that goes on the playbill and the cast recording is effectively the thumbnail of the show. And while I think it is like less impactful than a YouTube thumbnail, because there is more that you're probably going to know about a show besides just directly the image, that does do a lot for branding and like bringing in tourists to see your show and stuff like that. And so it would be very fun to do cross comparisons of playbills and YouTube thumbnails. But I think the major difference probably is playbills, I think, have a tendency to play it too safe where I didn't even show you like the eons of just kind of boring playbills there are more or less just like the title of the show, or like, here's the celebrity who's in our show. Here's their face on a playbill. You like this celebrity, come see our show, that kind of thing. Versus like, I think YouTube thumbnails are much more inclined to go like too wild and clickbaity. And so they're, they're sort of like different balances there. But I tried to get a selection of playbills that I genuinely really like. And then also just the assassin one, because I cannot talk about playbill design without talking about the one that haunts my dreams. All right. That is going to be all today about playbill design. I hope you enjoyed this little excursion into Quinn's incredible nerdiness. I will make everything I do about theater or I'll die doing it. As we are wrapping up, we also wanted to take a minute to tell you about another show that you might like on Relay FM. And that is Clockwise. It is hosted by Dan Moren and Mikah Sargent who are absolute delights. Every single episode, it's every Wednesday, they bring two guests on to talk about four different tech topics in 30 minutes. So this is an awesome show if you want to keep up with any tech topics but don't want to devote a lot of time to it. And you just want these quick bites from a diverse set of opinions because they had different people coming on every week. Sometimes they even have people of questionable technology backgrounds like me. I have very occasionally appeared on this show, fun fact. But don't let that dissuade you from listening. Cause most of the people coming on the show actually know quite a bit about technology and it makes for a really fun time.

Betty: Well, that is good to know. I have listened to some episodes of this show and they do speak very fast, but I think that is, that is what they're going for. And it's, it's quick and you get a lot of information. They actually have recently done a couple of episodes where they talk about NFTs, which we have previously mentioned I think last week's episode of pictorial, we talked about NFTs. And so in episode 388, “we put the fun in fungible” and episode 389 “robots don't have feelings,” they talk about it so, you know, while it's quite a different show from ours, there is crossover.

Quinn: You can go check that out at relay.fm/clockwise, or just search Clockwise wherever you get your podcasts. You can find our show notes at relay.fm/pictorial. And you can also find us on Twitter or Instagram @PictorialPod. We'll be posting all of the playbills we talk today on our Instagram so check it out. You can also find me on Instagram @aspiringrobotfm.

Betty: And you can also find me on Twitter or Instagram @articulationsv. And I'm also on YouTube as ARTiculations, and speaking of YouTube, we also upload these podcast episodes to YouTube. They usually come out a few days, sometimes weeks after the podcast audio release. But this is where you can watch the episode along and today you would be able to look at all the playbills on screen as we are discussing them.

Quinn: Thanks for listening, art enthusiasts!