CVNC is Getting a New Look!

Rebranding Campaign, Updated Website to Come

We are so excited to get to share some big news with you! CVNC is rebranding! 

CVNC has contracted Vitruvian Vector out of Winston-Salem, NC, to update the Cultural Voice of North Carolina's brand and website. After announcing CVNC's official name change on March 1, 2022, the leadership team - including staff, board, and writers on an internal branding committee - discussed some goals related to the look and feel of CVNC.org and its related branding. The main elements this team came back to were ease of use, streamlined infrastructure and back-end editing, and visual modernization. Much of these changes will happen behind the scenes in the next 6-8 weeks as the website is migrated to a newer host that will be easier to edit and customize while preserving the integrity of our archived articles and events. However, the branding changes are the first visible results of these efforts and the leadership team has been bursting to share the results!

History

Thanks to the efforts of four dedicated founders, CVNC was born on July 4, 2001, and has been publishing a comprehensive, statewide calendar of arts events ever since. The journal itself - housing news articles, editorial reviews by professional journalists, writers, and artists - was custom-created with the leading technology of the time to organize hundreds of presenters, thousands of articles, and tens of thousands of event listings. Our coverage has only continued to grow, with writers focusing on every artform we can think of - and more as we continue to learn from local artists and organizations!

The red velvet curtain that has been incorporated into our logo for a decade has been our defining visual element, setting the stage, as it were, to introduce audiences to arts across the state. However, as we have grown from our beginnings in classical music reviews to a more widely representative cultural arts hub, we felt that the curtain was a metaphorical division. Heavy, velvet curtains hide "behind-the-scenes" action from audiences, absorb sound and light, and instill a sense of grandeur based on centuries of tradition (here's a little more history on stage curtains, for anyone interested). This 'grandeur' has historically excluded many groups of people, as it has its roots in elitist cultural practices. Visual art exhibition, similarly, has its roots in private collections displayed by the wealthy, who only deigned to exhibit their works to the socioeconomically privileged (here's a whole course that goes into more detail on museum history).

The New Story

In 2023, CVNC wants to present a more equitable look at the arts, covering a wider variety of art styles, hiring more diverse writers, and collaborating with as many artists and organizations across NC as possible to give the most representative look at the arts going on in our communities. The new branding represents this idea of coming together to share art with everyone. The visually-striking logo still contains the ubiquitous acronym, but the curtain has been replaced with a stylized speech bubble, invoking the idea of coming together to discuss the arts, rather than presenting an end-all, be-all opinion. We recognize that a large component of our work is editorial, and that our reviews, while generally written from the point of view of accomplished artists and writers with experience both in creating and assessing various artforms, are written by individuals with unique opinions. 

The Brand 

Our new, stylized speech bubble is framed by a broken panel of four secondary colors, representing the coming together of varied art forms, cultures, backgrounds, geographic regions, and perspectives of our writers, staff, and readers. The secondary colors in and of themselves symbolize evolution and complexity of ideas within the arts. In general, the new style is bold, modern, and visually striking.

We plan to implement similar changes in the overall website design in the weeks to come. Work is already underway on a modernized infrastructure that will streamline the editing and publishing of content, and visually reflect advances in communications about the arts over recent decades. Our search function will be improved, we will have accessibility in mind from the ground up, but we will not lose any of our archive of reviews or articles, preserving the recent history of the cultural arts in North Carolina. The website will have increased photo and video compatibility, allowing us to present on a more engaging and artistic platform.

We can't do it without your support - talk to your favorite artists and presenters about us, help them get listed on our event calendar, learn how to get involved with our organization, or help support the website update project.

See more updates and branding information on our Facebook and Twitter accounts, and make sure to follow us for the latest review postings and announcements!

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