LIFE AND TRUST
Logo Design • Branding • Presentation
This immersive theater production takes place in a Wall Street banking hall and five stories of basements below. Audience members follow a reimagined story of Faust through 1890s New York-inspired sets, seeing each of the show’s characters make their own “deals with the devil”.
I created a logo to represent this experience as well as three conceptual aspects: Life and Trust the fictional bank, Life and Trust the show, and the Faustian bargain undertaken by the shows’ characters.
Final Logo
After many designs and redesigns, we landed on this logo—a 2025 recreation of the preexisting ironwork on the façade of the 1920s building. It seemed only natural to play up the beautiful art-deco details that adorned the inside and outside of the venue. By iterating on the original 1920s ironwork, the logo also gave the sense that the company had been around for a long time, allowing the building to do the storytelling.
The lock and key are emblematic of a “done deal”, with the keyhole glowing ominously red, suggesting a deal with the devil. The key teeth have been altered to mirror the double E logo of Emursive, the show’s production company. The letters “F,A,U,S,T” are also bolder than the rest, an Easter egg nodding to the show’s content.
LOGO DESIGN PROCESS & ITERATIONS
In the show, the protagonist makes his initial fortune selling “cure all” medicine, or “snake oil”, before leveraging his money to shift into banking. All of the characters wrestle with some sort of “deal with the devil” in the show, and chains become a recurring motif – in terms of both breaking free of one’s circumstances, as well as the literal chains a Houdini-like figure breaks out of throughout the show.
These pharmaceutical origins, as well as the show’s theme of chains, informed my early logo development for Life And Trust.
Chain Poppy
Conwell’s syrup – the protagonist’s flagship product, was derived from poppy seeds, thus a highly addictive opiate. This logo reflects the origins of Conwell’s fortune and also piggybacks on the numerous poppies already present in the building’s Art-Deco architecture.
Snake Chains
The snake is a symbol of deception, going back to Adam and Eve’s original deal with the devil. It is also a commonly used and misused (see my presentation for details) symbol of medicine, an apt reflection of Conwell’s origins. The snake is arranged in a chainlink pattern, to touch upon the show’s theme of breaking free (or failing to) of ones circumstances. Finally, the “S” shape of the snake is repeated down several times, to symbolize the descent that guests must take as they make their way down the building’s five floors.