Life and Trust
Logo Design • Branding • Motion Design
The McKittrick Hotel’s immersive theater production Life and Trust takes place inside a real Art Deco Wall Street banking hall, with five stories of basement sets beneath it. The brand needed to represent three things simultaneously: the fictional bank, the show itself, and the Faustian bargain at the center of the story. I built the full visual identity from that premise — a system rooted in the building’s original 1920s ironwork, extended across all show materials. The logo centers on a lock and key suggesting a done deal, with a glowing red keyhole as a nod to the devil’s bargain. The letters F, A, U, S, T are subtly bolded within the logotype, and the key’s teeth echo the production company Emursive’s double-E mark.
To learn more about the design process behind this logo, please check out the logo guidelines and initial concept presentation.
Marketing
My team and I developed a multi-layered campaign for Life and Trust that extended well beyond traditional email and social media. We created immersive touchpoints like an in-world newspaper to be placed in Conwell Coffee Hall, authentic banking documents such as slips and business cards, and even a character quiz that let guests discover which figures from the show they most resembled. The logo was added to a massive painted mural in the cafe
Finally, we created a teaser trailer for the show, which was displayed on screens in the cafe.
Experiential Design
Beyond marketing materials, I also designed assets that became part of the show itself. The primary logo appears in the mural at Conwell Coffee Hall, while the “time travel hallway” featured a series of archival posters I helped create to represent the bank’s evolving logos across different decades, up to modern day. I also designed the emblem for the “Alexandria Club,” a secretive stone-mason’s lodge–style society where high society gathered to explore architecture, mysticism, and the occult.
