The making of our seasonal brochures: a marketing team perspective
Our brochures remain central to how we share the season with our community. Even with a website, social channels, and a busy box office, the printed brochure gives audiences something tangible to browse over a coffee or pin to the fridge at home. In our offices above Teatre El Jardí, the marketing team gathers each year to turn a calendar of performances, workshops, and school activities into a publication that feels both useful and inviting.
Because Figueres a Escena welcomes visitors from across the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, the brochure has to speak to returning locals, festival tourists on their way to the Dalí Theatre-Museum, and international guests planning cultural itineraries around the autumn season. That audience diversity shapes every choice, from the colour palette to the wording on the back cover, including the many Australian arts enthusiasts who now subscribe to our mailing list from cities such as Sydney and Melbourne.
Mapping the season ahead
The brochure begins with a blank wall in our meeting room and a stack of coloured post-it notes. Each note carries a title, a date, and the venue, whether Teatre El Jardí, Sala La Cate, or one of the partner spaces across the Catalan theatre network. The artistic direction meets with the marketing team in late spring to lock the headline productions, and from there we work backwards to schedule studio shoots, design deadlines, and print lead times.
We also map the rhythm of the town. School holidays in Catalonia push family programming into specific weeks, and the August calendar leans on tourists who arrive for the local festival and the broader Empordà cultural calendar. These patterns matter because every section of the brochure is shaped by who will be in the room and when.
Understanding Australian audiences
Australia runs one of the most vibrant performing arts ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere, anchored by the Sydney Opera House, Arts Centre Melbourne, and the Brisbane Festival. Australians expect festival programs to feel generous in scale, full of options, and clearly priced, and they often browse brochures on a tablet while waiting at the airport or relaxing in a Manly café.
Local language matters more than people think. Words like "arvo" for an afternoon show, "brekkie" sessions on a Sunday morning, or simply the relaxed cadence of Australian English slip naturally into our English-language summary sheets. We do not overdo it, but a tone that sounds friendly rather than formal travels well across time zones and into lounge rooms from Perth to Parramatta.
Researching venues and local realities
When we study the performing-arts scene in cities like Adelaide, Sydney, and Brisbane, we look at how companies there communicate with families, retirees, and international visitors. Adelaide Festival sets a high bar for printed program design, and Melbourne's Malthouse Theatre shows how a small publication can carry weighty season announcements. We borrow generously from these models while keeping our Catalan identity on every page.
A brochure is also a quiet teacher. We include small reminders of house etiquette, an idea we explored more deeply in intermission etiquette at live performances. Audiences who have flown in from Hobart or Brisbane appreciate these gentle prompts, especially for opera or classical music performances where silence is sacred.
Writing copy that resonates
Our copy blends Catalan context with accessible English. The challenge is to describe a deeply local tradition in a way that feels relevant to a backpacker on a Eurail pass, a retiree from Hobart planning a river-cruise stopover, or a teacher booking a school outing. We avoid jargon, keep paragraphs short, and use plain sentences that an eight-year-old and a grandparent can both read.
Children's programming gets its own voice. We have watched our family season grow year on year, and you can trace that growth in the evolution of our children's theatre series over five years. The copy in that section runs warmer, with shorter sentences, more exclamation, and images large enough to be seen from across a hotel lobby in Newtown or a beachside café in Bondi.
Visual storytelling through photography
Photography sits at the heart of every brochure. We shoot at dress rehearsals, sometimes asking the artistic team to pause a moment in the wings so we can capture the atmosphere. Costume colours, set textures, and facial expressions all become part of how we tell the story of the season before the audience has even booked a ticket.
For the children's section, we bring in young audiences from ATEB to participate in the shoots. Their genuine reactions give the pages a warmth that staged photography never matches. We avoid over-editing because the performances themselves carry enough drama. The image-to-text ratio is planned page by page, and the formats differ slightly to suit how readers in different cities browse.
| Format | Strengths | Best use |
|---|---|---|
| Printed A5 booklet | Tangible, collectable, easy to fold into a bag | Tourist offices, partner hotels, box office pick-up |
| Digital flipbook | Searchable, screen-readable, shareable by email | Subscriber e-newsletters, social posts |
| Pull-out poster | Wall-friendly, visible reminder of dates | Classrooms, café noticeboards |
| Pocket-sized zine | Lightweight, fits in a coat pocket | Festival weekend giveaways |
Designing the layout and flow
The layout follows a familiar pattern across European arts brochures, but we test small variations each season. A clean grid keeps the page calm, while generous white space lets images do some of the storytelling. Type choices matter too: we use a serif for performance titles to suggest tradition and a clean sans-serif for practical information, helping readers navigate at speed.
We also weigh paper stock carefully. A heavier matt stock feels substantial without being wasteful, and a soft-touch laminate adds a tactile pleasure that Australians, who appreciate a well-printed object, often comment on in their reply cards. Folding, saddle-stitching, and perforation for the booking form each affect how readers physically engage with the publication, and we test every option with a small print run before committing to the full order.
Production, printing, and distribution
Final proofs go through three rounds of correction before the printer in Girona runs the offset press. We allow a six-week window from the final artwork to delivery at our warehouse, and the brochures are usually out two weeks before the season opens. Distribution partners include cultural offices in Empordà, regional tourist boards, consulates in major cities, and selected B&Bs that welcome cultural travellers.
Digital versions go live the same day. A new season launch always feels like a small festival in the office, with the printers in the morning, the website updated by lunch, and the social posts scheduled for the arvo. We track which channels bring the strongest response and feed that data back into the next planning meeting, so each brochure gets a little sharper than the last.
Ready to hold the new season in your hands? Pop into Teatre El Jardí or Sala La Cate to pick up a copy, browse our digital flipbook online, or sign up for our seasonal mailing to have one delivered to your inbox before tickets go on sale.