Case study: Donmar Warehouse

The Donmar, as it's fondly known, is a renowned and much-loved theatre in London's Covent Garden. From world-first plays to classics and musicals, work from the Donmar often features big-name stars and transfers to the West End and Broadway. 

One of the many things that makes the Donmar exceptional is the intimacy of their performances – the theatre has just 251 seats. With audiences no more than four rows from the stage, the Donmar experience is personal, immersive, and profoundly special.

The challenge

For over 30 years, the theatre's brand and visual identity remained largely unchanged. Online, it was a similar story. 

Their website, although not that old, had been built with an off-the-shelf product, which was too rigid and generic for the Donmar team's ambitions. And website visitors found it clunky, cold, and lacking in personality. 

The theatre's digital home simply wasn't living up to the quality or uniqueness of the in-person experience. So, the Donmar team decided it was time for a change.

They appointed SomeOne to develop a new brand strategy and visual identity. And they chose Supercool to design, build, and support their brand new website. 

But we wouldn’t be designing the website once the new brand was completed. We’d be working on it while the brand and visual identity were still taking shape. 

Our first challenge was to ensure the process was a positive and enjoyable experience for the Donmar team, who'd be taking on a lot of change and decision-making. Added to this, we were working with SomeOne for the first time too. Lots of unknowns, all around! 

As the Donmar is a much-loved venue, we knew there'd be a lot of eyes on the new website – especially with it being the main touchpoint for their brand. So, another key challenge was to create a striking design that warmly welcomes new, younger audiences. Encouraging them to feel at home, without alienating the theatre’s many loyal and devoted fans. 

The new website needed to feel like the same exceptional 'Donmar' – but with a zhuzhed-up look and a new lease of life.

Our solutions

Collaborative working

At Supercool, we have form working on this kind of project. We’ve crafted new websites in conjunction with rebrands for the likes of Bristol Old Vic, Chichester Festival Theatre, Sheffield Theatres, Paraorchestra, the CBSO, and more.

This extensive experience helped us to create an efficient, collaborative, and practical working process with the teams at the Donmar and SomeOne. Through a series of briefing sessions and workshops, we all shared ideas and feedback about how the evolving brand would work in practice. 

Everyone was so open and collaborative during this phase. Coming from a point of mutual trust and respect allowed for honest conversations and feedback. It also created the perfect atmosphere for generating – and experimenting with – new ideas. 

The teams at the Donmar and SomeOne continued to feed back as we moved into the website's build phase. So, rather than a hand-off, this was a genuinely collaborative process. The partnership worked beautifully – both in terms of the process itself and, importantly, the final result.

Translating the brand into a digital design system

Rather than working from polished brand guidelines, we were privvy to sketches and concepts as soon as the team at Donmar were confident with SomeOne’s creative direction. That early involvement was incredibly helpful.

Website design – from the visual design of the interface to the more dynamic user experience design – is always a careful balance of convention and creativity. 

Convention allows users to instinctively understand how a website works, without having to think too much about what they're doing. 

Creativity adds the emotion – that flare and differentiation which is such a vital part of brand-building. And being involved during the development stage of the Donmar rebrand helped us to weave that brand essence into the very fabric of the website. 

The brand centres on the idea of 'Powerfully Intimate Theatre’ – and that tension between power and intimacy plays out through scale, depth, movement, and colour. 

A brand identity, however, is a very different beast from a fully functioning website. 

There are decisions and considerations around digital implementation of a brand that aren't usually covered in the brand development process. In this case, however, our early involvement and digital expertise allowed us to help shape the final result.

The Donmar ribbon

On desktop, the Donmar's iconic logo – too distinctive to lose after 30 years! – sits within left-hand vertical navigation. We call this 'the ribbon’, and it expands and contracts to frame website content. Combined with an outer red frame and generous negative space, it gives pages room to breathe. On mobile, the vertical navigation disappears, but the frame remains, albeit scaled down. This provides consistency across every breakpoint.

So, the Donmar ribbon does double-duty on the website. Using it as part of the navigation and content-framing gives it a functional job, on top of its main role as a visual hook. This provides extra emphasis, reinforcing the importance of this key brand element.

Managing all the red!

Donmar red is intentionally bold and striking. But it can be a lot! 

So the website uses imagery and animated textures to break up blocks of colour across pages. Interrupting the red helps to keep things visually balanced. 

Added to this, we devised a suite of additional red tones, to support the core Donmar red. And of course, all reds were selected to ensure they not only look great, but meet Accessibility criteria.

Selective animation

The beautifully animated textures, developed by SomeOne, represent a range of emotions that may be felt in the Donmar – anticipation, empathy, excitement. We display these animations in specially-selected areas of the website. Not every page needs movement.

Typography

The brand's bold, condensed typeface is used with confidence – oversized and impactful, working as well on mobile as it does on larger screens. There's always a careful balance to be found between what looks good, and what will work for website users in practice.

In a break from offline brand implementations, the website is sparing with the number of typeface weights and styles used. This not only keeps the user interface design system lean, it also improves website performance. Because fewer typeface files = a faster website. Win-win.

Our impact

Early involvement in the Donmar’s brand development process allowed us to clearly understand the context behind creative decisions. This 'insider knowledge' enabled us to incorporate the brand’s essence into the very earliest stages of the website’s design. 

And, our unique position and perspective as one of several partners in the project, allowed us to retain focus on our specialism – digital brand implementation. Meaning we were able to guide and influence key areas of how the brand works online.

These kinds of decisions can only happen when teams with different areas of expertise are in the room. And when everyone is afforded the space and freedom to play to their core strengths. 

Huge thanks and kudos to our friends at the Donmar and the team at SomeOne for being so trusting, open, and genuinely collaborative throughout this process. The success of this partnership approach is borne out by the striking end result.

What we're most proud of

As well as the functional, transactional side of things working brilliantly from the outset, we're especially proud of the warmth that now exudes from the Donmar website. 

By having the Donmar's brand essence baked into its very heart, the website now showcases the theatre as it really is – vivid, intimate, people-focused, and powerful.

A seriously good website for seriously good theatre: donmarwarehouse.com