Teatro Norte had lost its younger audience to streaming and to the bars on the same street. The 2024 season had nine productions, three of them new Portuguese writing nobody had heard of, and a print budget that covered posters but not a media campaign. The house style was a polite photo with the title underneath — the posters disappeared on the walls of Porto within a week.

We built the season from type alone: one heavy grotesque, black and a single theatre red, with every title cut into blocks that change shape from play to play. Posters, ticket cards and the lobby screens shared one grid, so the theatre's own team could set a late addition in an hour. We printed on cheap newsprint and pasted in series of six.

The season sold 92 % of its seats, the best spring the box office has recorded in a decade. Under-30 bookings doubled, and two of the new plays were extended by a week. The newsprint series became a thing people photographed, then collected — the theatre now sells the full set in the lobby. The theatre has booked the same type system for its next two seasons.