Brand identity and concert design for the Davis Chamber Players
Case Study · Jess L McPeak · Graphic Designer, Freelance (January 2023 – present)
The client and the engagement
The Davis Chamber Players (DCP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and chamber-music concert series in Davis, California, founded and directed by cellist Chris Z. Each season brings together local student, amateur, and professional classical musicians from the Davis and Sacramento areas for free community concerts, supported by the City of Davis, the Yolo Community Foundation, and the Sacramento Region Community Foundation.
I've been DCP's freelance graphic designer since 2023. What began as a brand-identity redesign has become an ongoing role designing the materials for each concert season: posters, programs, newspaper ads, one-page programs, and flyers. The Fall 2026 concert is next.
The throughline is a single flexible identity: one that can look classical for a Schubert program or boldly typographic for a season of modern repertoire and still read as the same group.
Brand identity: a bass-clef monogram
DCP came to me with an existing but dated identity. The redesign needed a mark that worked on a concert program, held up in a single ink color, and stayed legible everywhere from a printed booklet to a small social avatar. I worked through it in three stages in Adobe Illustrator.
First I focused on the wordmark alone, drawing dozens of treatments of "Davis Chamber Players": serif against sans, uppercase against lowercase, different weights, and different ways to stack the three words. That settled the voice as a high-contrast classical serif in a compact three-line lockup.
Next I brought in musical forms (treble and bass clefs and a circular containing shape) and tested how the wordmark might sit with them. I drew the clef as an original vector instead of using a found glyph (my working files still carry the note to myself, "placeholder — need to make own bass-clef vector"), so the finished mark would be fully ownable and clean in print.
From there I refined the direction I'd chosen: a circle with a bass clef whose curl forms the right edge of the roundel and whose two dots sit just outside it. I tightened the proportions, made a reversed (knockout) version alongside the positive one, and drew both uppercase and lowercase variants so the identity could change register from one season to the next.
The final mark is a compact roundel: the wordmark stacked inside a circle that reads as a clock face, an instrument body, or a clef. It holds up at small sizes and works in a single color.
A season-by-season concert system
The recurring work was promoting each concert. For a season I designed a coordinated set: a portrait poster, a landscape newspaper ad for The California Aggie, a full concert-program booklet, a one-page program, and flyers, all built from one concept and sized to each format.
Instead of reusing a single template, I gave each concert a concept drawn from its own repertoire. The Fall 2025 program was headlined by Schubert's "Trout" Quintet, so the artwork ran with it: a rainbow-trout illustration on a deep crimson field, with an italic serif curving across the cover. The poster set the trout behind a row of circular performer portraits that pick up the logo's roundel, along with the date, venue, and funders' logos, and the same concept reflowed into the wide horizontal Aggie ad.
Spring 2024 went the other way. A program of Ravel, Brahms, Borodin, and Schumann got huge condensed sans-serif names overlapping at angles over grayscale composer portraits and a montage of performers. The result was bold and type-driven, about as far from the Fall 2025 cover as the brand could go while still reading as DCP.
Carrying the same information across portrait, landscape, and booklet formats, and across seasons with opposite moods, is the part of the work I like most: the brand has to bend to each concert without coming apart.
The concert program: editorial and information design
The program booklet was the most text-heavy piece, and the one that rewarded careful editorial work the most. Each issue set a full repertoire listing (composers, works, opus and movement numbers, and the performers and instruments for every piece), with the usual musical-typography conventions like italicized movement titles and per-work attribution. Around that ran the director's mission note and several pages of performer biographies, each with a headshot and set for easy reading.
This is the kind of dense, multi-section document where hierarchy and typographic discipline do the real work: a program of seven pieces and a dozen musicians has to stay legible and easy to follow in the hand.
Rehearsal photography for an in-house image library
To keep the collateral supplied with usable images, I photographed rehearsals and built up a stock for DCP to draw on. That archive (separate from the performers' own supplied headshots) gave the posters, programs, and ads a consistent in-house source instead of a mix of borrowed photos.
What I learned from the engagement
The Davis Chamber Players is the longest-running piece of my freelance work, and the one I've learned the most from. It's a real client with a real budget, and because the engagement is ongoing, I treat the identity as something I keep coming back to and adjusting as each new season comes up. Across several seasons I've gotten to do most of what identity design involves: drawing a logo from scratch, then building a concert system that can look formal one year and bold the next. The part I value most is seeing all of it in use — printed, mailed, run in the local paper, and handed to people at the concerts.