St. Ann’s Warehouse

The New St. Ann’s Warehouse

In 2015, St. Ann’s Warehouse moved into their first permanent home, the restored Tobacco Warehouse at 45 Water Street in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Flyleaf worked hand-in-hand with executive leadership at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Charcoalblue, Marvel Architects, and artist and sculptor Tom Fruin to bring the historical building to life.

As part of the Tobacco Warehouse’s restoration into a functioning theater and community space, Flyleaf designed exterior signage including the bulkhead sign that sits on top of the building in The Max Family Garden and the custom lightbox structures; primary and secondary interior wayfinding; primary, secondary, and individual donor signage; and ADA compliance signage. We also collaborated with artist Tom Fruin to design the often-photographed colored neon marquee that rests on the Old Dock Street side of the building.

Working closely with the client to get a profound understanding of the organization’s needs each year and the decision-making behind their programming, we can more deeply consider ancillary materials used by various departments including development, operations, and marketing. Thorough strategic collaborative thinking goes into every design component we work on — whether for website users, directing guests at the theater, connecting meaningfully with donors, or promoting the newest shows, we design and build out every campaign targeting potential new theatergoers and supporters, etc.

The season culminates in an annual Gala where Flyleaf is involved in conversations from its inception so that the event itself and the promotional materials we design are developed in tandem, maximizing efficiency for this high-revenue-generating event.

Spektrix Ticket Integration

Flyleaf designed an entirely mobile-responsive website that reflects the look that is quintessential to St. Ann’s, by offering a fresh take on show-related pages, accommodating more dynamic assets like video and large-scale imagery.

In 2020, St. Ann’s called on Flyleaf to revamp their site again, this time for ticketing integration. St. Ann’s sought a system that integrated more fully with their email and donor databases, allowed for easy backend management, and offered more design flexibility and functionality options like e-ticketing, which they hope to roll out in the near future. All the while, our goal was also to make the customer experience, from entering the site to completing a purchase, seamless.

Working with Spektrix to offer us the functionality we sought and the best technical support, Flyleaf applied technical expertise and design savvy and relied on our team’s own arts enthusiasts to weigh in on best practices for an arts organization’s website.

We redesigned the navigation as entry points to all possible purchase paths, employed a more dynamic calendar interface, streamlined how customers manage their accounts and how St. Ann’s manages that data, and enhanced the visibility of all the key information customers need to easily make a purchase.

A Season with Brand New Rules and LOTS of Deliverables

With the COVID-19 pandemic throwing arts organization into flux, St. Ann’s crafted a comprehensive season of programming for Fall 2020 — considerably more than ever before — with the hopes of keeping audiences engaged and artists working. But promoting these events didn’t come without its challenges.

For the first time ever, St. Ann’s was streaming shows weekly, which required our team to innovate how St. Ann’s website was now used: to host public events as well as exclusive, gated member events. Flyleaf’s tasks not only involved designing communications promoting these shows and events, but also offering marketing strategy to pivot towards campaigns that were now solely digital, and researching and implementing the proper technology for the streaming content itself.

St. Ann’s didn’t stop at streaming programming however. Uniquely using all facets of their building — rooftops for weekly pop-up concerts, exterior walls for projecting stunning photographs of activism, and exterior archways and doorways to display vibrant pieces of art — Flyleaf was a non-stop and one-stop shop for signage and digital marketing campaigns including weekly emails, SEM, and social media assets.