Aster Quartet

The Aster Quartet plays new commissions alongside late Beethoven, and wanted an identity that could hold both without irony. We gave them four strokes of ink — one per instrument — drawn in a single gesture and scanned at high resolution.

Approach

The mark never repeats exactly: each season it is redrawn, the way a phrase is never played twice the same way. Everything else is fixed — a strict typographic system for programmes and posters, set in one weight of one typeface, with the concert date as the largest element on the page.

Season subscriptions rose by a fifth in the first year, and the posters have started disappearing from venue walls — the good kind of theft.