Work
Cinema United represents more than 500 theater companies and 61,000 screens across 80+ countries. They had just completed a major rebrand, changing from the name NATO (the National Alliance of Theatre Owners) to something that didn’t trigger international confusion!
But the logo was just a starting point. The style guide was thin, templates were inconsistent, and looming on the calendar was CinemaCon—the industry’s official convention at Caesars Palace, where Cinema United’s CEO delivers the keynote address the entire industry watches. Without a fully realized design system, Cinema United risked walking into its highest-profile moment of the year without the visual language to back it up.
Discovery surfaced a tension that runs through everything Cinema United does: the organization has to speak authoritatively to legislators and industry insiders while also celebrating the emotional, almost nostalgic joy of going to the movies. Their own language for it—”between the Smithsonian and Letterboxd”— became the compass for every design decision that followed.
We created a brand that feels confident without arrogance, cinematic without cliché, and forward-looking without erasing the legacy that made the industry worth celebrating. Teal conducted a design discovery session and then moved directly into two deck concepts for CinemaCon — pressure-testing this tonal balance in the highest-stakes context first, before expanding outward.
The CinemaCon stage has a massive screen, so the design has to hold its own at a scale where every compositional decision is amplified.
The selected concept included an expanded color palette that balanced retro warmth with forward momentum, cinematic screen-shape silhouettes, and slide treatments that created genuine visual variety without losing coherence.
With the deck proving the visual direction, Teal extended the work into a comprehensive brand guide built to give Cinema United’s small, high-volume team the tools to produce consistently without a designer in the room. The guide lives as an interactive site—not a static PDF—and covers typography, color system, photography direction, and graphic element usage.
Check out the Brand Guide
The bracket system and the expanded color palette gave us something we hadn't had before: a visual language that works equally well on a congressional briefing and a social post. The guide has been referenced in every production cycle since we received it. Teal built a system that speaks to our entire member base from the single-screen independent in rural Kansas to the major national chain.
The deliverables that followed—business cards, letterhead, email signatures, a report template, a webinar slide deck template—were each designed around the same reality: Cinema United’s team is small and high-volume, and the templates they rely on need to be airtight enough to maintain brand quality even when no designer touches them.
Cinema United arrived at CinemaCon with a keynote deck that matched the scale of the stage and left with a brand system built to hold up everywhere else the organization shows up. Teal helped close the gap between a promising rebrand and a fully operational identity system.
CinemaCon is the one moment each year when the entire industry is in the same room. Seeing the new brand system up on the keynote screen at Caesars — at that scale, in front of our members and studio partners — confirmed it had real authority. It looked like an organization that means business. The new identity has given us a forward-looking posture at a moment when the industry needed one.
An ongoing creative partnership built on one rule: never do what we did last year.
The part where we ask you to cough up your email. So we can discuss all the amazing things we’re gonna do together. No pressure. Really.