Jess L McPeak

Brand identity & concert design for the Davis Chamber Players

The Davis Chamber Players is a chamber-music concert series in Davis, California, where each season brings together local student, amateur, and professional classical musicians from the Davis & Sacramento areas for free community concerts.

I've been DCP's freelance graphic designer since 2023. The engagement began with a brand redesign and has grown into an ongoing role designing the materials for each concert season. The thread running through all of it was a single, flexible identity.

A bass-clef monogram

DCP came to me with an existing but dated identity. The redesign needed a mark that was legible and felt at home across a variety of media and contexts. I worked through it in three stages in Adobe Illustrator.

I started with the wordmark alone, exploring serif versus sans, uppercase versus lowercase, weight, and how the words stacked. This narrowed the voice to a high-contrast classical serif set in a compact lockup.

Next I brought in musical forms and Davis iconography: treble & bass clefs and penny-farthing bicycles; testing how the wordmark could sit with them.

The winning direction paired a circle with a bass clef to create the form of a penny-farthing, with the wordmark sitting inside the larger wheel. Recognizable at a glance, and built to survive manipulation.

Concert promotion

The recurring work was promoting each concert. For a given season I designed a coordinated set: a poster, a one-page program, and a full concert program booklet. Rather than reuse a single template, I gave each concert a concept drawn from its own repertoire:

• Fall 2025: The program was headlined by Schubert's "Trout" Quintet, so the season's imagery ran with it: a rainbow-trout illustration on a crimson background, with an italic serif curving along the fish's body.
• Spring 2024: A season of Ravel, Brahms, Borodin, and Schumann, got a type-driven treatment. Huge condensed sans-serif names overlapping at angles, layered over grayscale composer portraits and a montage of performers.

Designing similar information across varied formats and seasons was an exercise in both flexibility and consistency.

Concert programs

The program booklets are the most text-heavy deliverables and require careful editorial design. Each issue sets a full repertoire listing: composers, works, opus and movement structure, as well as performers & instruments, for every piece. Around the program sits the director's mission note and several pages of long-form performer biographies, each paired with a headshot.

It's the kind of dense, multi-section document where hierarchy and typographic discipline keep the information clear and easy to follow.

Photography

To keep the collateral supplied with usable imagery, I photographed rehearsals to build a stock of images. This archive (aside from the performers' own supplied headshots) gives the posters and programs a consistent, in-house visual source rather than a patchwork of borrowed photos.

Reflection

An ongoing engagement means the identity has to be something I can return to, extend, and occasionally reinvent, without rebuilding it from scratch. It's let me practice the full arc of identity design, from a versatile logo to a concert system flexible enough to look elegant one season and bold the next; all of it printed, posted, and handed to audiences. More than any single deliverable, it's shown me how a visual identity earns its keep over time.