Serino Coyne Designer Christy Borg Talks the Making of the 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE Key Art

When Christy Borg, an associate creative director at Broadway advertising agency Serino Coyne, got word she’d get to work on the key art for the new Off-Broadway revival of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, she knew immediately: “oh, this one’s really fun.”

The first thing you see when you’re handed a program, stop at a marquis, or walk through Schubert Alley. Broadway’s key art is at the center of a show’s brand identity — and capturing its essence is no small task. Borg likens the process to being a museum curator; it’s all about coming up with the right concept and finding the right people to bring it to life.

For Spelling Bee, she gave special consideration to finding the right balance between paying homage to the beloved original while highlighting the new revival’s energy. 

“It's the first major revival in 20 years,” Borg said. “We want to make sure we're honoring the legacy of William Finn, but we have a new creative team behind this property. We have new costume designs and new scenic design, a new director at the helm of this production, so how do we find the sort of balance between honoring the original and making it clear that this was  a new thing.”

Borg and her team wanted to toe the line between the art feeling youthful and playful without feeling juvenile. The original key art features clay figures by an artist named Amy Vangsgard — and Borg wanted to maintain the “bespoke-ness” from the original. So, she came across a pair of artists from Amsterdam who go by the name GoodDog.TV and Itsacat Studio, otherwise known as Jonas Nunes and Catarina Alves.

“We all just immediately fell in love with their style and their energy and the way that they crafted their character work and that sort of thing,” Borg said. “We really fell in love with this idea of all the hands fighting for that trophy. It's a way of bringing those characters to the forefront of the art without specifically being about any one actor or character specifically.”

In deciding the color scheme, the team decided the "Spelling Bee blue" felt like the perfect playful energy, while still feeling like “school.” It also served as a strong contrast to the characters — the pink in Olive's jacket, the red in William's socks, and the gold of the trophy stick out.

In the 15 years Borg has been in this line of work, the process of creating key art has changed drastically. Before digital ruled, key art primarily lived on window cards and posters; now, everything needs to be scalable and work on screens big and small. How does the art move? How will it feel to see it on a walk through Times Square or when scrolling on your feed? 

But some things remain the same: that euphoric feeling of seeing the work pay off when audiences can connect with the key art.

“It's very humbling to then step outside and look up in the middle of Times Square and see  there's a giant billboard with what we've been working on for the past several months and weeks,” Borg said. “It is certainly one of my favorite moments in the entire process is that moment of launch because then it's like, you finally release it to the world and you kind of get to see it in action.”