Output: Sundays on The Roof
Defining the visual language of New York’s most notorious Sunday party.
The Roof started in 2013. The files I still have are mostly from the 2014 season, and what they show is not an identity project. It is a design system with a deliberate ownership split, built under weekly deadline pressure, for a client whose content changed faster than any single designer could absorb.
Nobody called it that at the time, and I was not reading anyone’s release notes about it. Even when it didn’t have a name, it was what I did.
It came from the requirement rather than from a theory. Everything had to work together, a flyer and a digital select and a banner and a die-cut fan all reading as the same Roof from across a room and from a phone. I did not know how that was going to work. I knew it had to.
What actually changed every week
Working for clubs is intense in a specific and unglamorous way. Imagine you are doing the art for Paradise Garage or Studio 54, but you have to wait in line to get to your desk. Lineups and dates change constantly. A headliner drops. A support act gets added. A snowstorm downs flights across the country. An agent sends the wrong rider for an event in 48 hours.
None of those changes are design problems. Every one of them is urgent, because the flyer has to be printed, pasted and promoted before people decide where to get loose before a long work week. A single date announcement can go through revision after revision after revision, and not one of those revisions requires a decision. They require someone to still be awake and still be careful on the last one. Did you misspell that 11th hour rider? Someone’s going to get it.
That is a stamina problem wearing the costume of a design problem, and the two look identical from the outside until you have been buried by one of them.
Responsibilities
- Art Direction
- Brand & Identity Design
- Print, Web, and Digital Assets
Fitting into an Existing Design Complex
Output already had a defined interior language: imported East German fixtures, industrial detailing, a severe, brutalist DDR sensibility. Those fixtures were not a mood board. John Casey, an operations manager at Output or functionally doing that job, had an education in Art History and Architecture. He helped a team of architects get actual East German DDR pieces for the club. Not reproductions, and not a vintage dealer in New York selling the look at a markup. They went to a scrap yard in Berlin and pulled the real ones out of it. That is a long way to go for something most people in the room will never consciously notice, and it is exactly why the room felt the way it did.
It also set the bar I had to meet. Output had an existing agency’s branding in place. Shawn Schwartz, who co-founded Output, ran Halcyon, and did as much as anyone to push New York techno, brought me in. He needed a new daytime dance floor, The Roof, to feel lighter and more open than the main club while still reading as native to that established identity: not a knockoff of the brand, not a departure from it. The Roof wasn’t a minor room inside a minor club. It was the daytime counterpart to a venue serious enough that its closing warranted national coverage.
Press
When Output closed, the coverage was national. The Roof ran from 2013 to the last summer, under one visual identity the whole way.
Finding the reference
The brief was to make The Roof feel lighter than the main club without reading as a departure from it: a narrower problem than most identity work, matching a distinct, established visual language while inverting its mood rather than replacing it.
Shawn jokingly threw out Georges Seurat’s pointillist painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. The texture and warmth immediately felt right, and it became the starting point for experimenting further with texture and type.
The edge Seurat couldn’t reach
Classic masterpieces suggested the structure of Sunday leisure, but the project needed something a little edgier than a few impressionist paintings could carry on their own. I looked for imagery that could hold pleasure and unease in the same frame. Going through old art-history notes, I came across Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a triptych of saints and sinners that supplied the excess, fantasy, and moral chaos the Seurat reference couldn’t reach alone. Together, they made The Roof feel lighter than the main room without going soft or anonymous.
Framing chaos
The Bosch painting had a practical advantage beyond how it looked: Google had made a two-gigabyte gigapixel scan of it, which meant a ridiculous number of usable variations and none of them hard to find. The triptych’s three panels, Eden, Earthly Delights, and Hell, supplied elements for a visual language that could stay playful, chaotic, and a little dark without collapsing into either extreme. The detail is incredible. You can see dust on the paint chips.
The painting is also in the public domain, which meant no licensing fees, no selects, and no worries. I could quickly pick a few scenes and hand them to the in-house designers and know there’d be far more available for the rest of the season.
Reading against reputation
Output’s own press record corroborates the club’s cultural weight independent of anything on this page: both Interview Magazine’s retrospective interview with Justin Strauss and The New York Times’ “Long Live Output” piece treat the club’s 2013–2018 run as a genuine loss to New York nightlife when it closed. Neither piece is about the visual identity work specifically, so the credit for this design system rests on my own account, the same as most work from this period on this site. What the coverage establishes is the premise the brief above rests on. Designing “lighter, but still native” only matters as a constraint if the thing it has to stay native to is real.
Five seasons, one brand guideline
“Hundreds of events rode that” only works as an identity if the system survives repetition without becoming wallpaper. A print flyer, a digital select, and a merchandise piece all had to read as the same Roof from across a room and from a phone screen, week after week, without a design team resetting the direction each time a new date got announced. The type treatment and lockups which I had only thought of as being a summer brand ended up being integrated as the logo for the remainder of its run.
Outcome
One visual language, originally from a Seurat reference and a Bosch triptych, and a bold logotype carried across print flyers, digital selects, and merchandise for the hundreds of events that rode it. The selection below is a sample of the print and digital flyers that ran across that run, June through September.
In the wild
The flyers above are the files. These are the same identity off the screen: pasted on a wall in Williamsburg, and framed in the room.
The split
So I built it so the club’s own designers could take the files and run the small changes.
I kept the monthly and the really big weekend headliners. They took the recurring lineup and date changes.
I could do that because I already knew where files go to die. I have been working in digital since
Photoshop 2.5 and my first print piece for a techno event was 1998, which means I have watched
enough jobs rot from the inside to know the failure is never the design. It is final, then
final-01, final-01a, final-02, FINAL-V03, and now you are spending more time sorting
through files than making anything. I am fast once I am going. Setup is the part that
takes a minute, and after that, with a gigapixel source sitting there, I am just moving.
The math was small enough to be honest about. Sundays, maybe a second party, call it four a month plus the monthly. Six assets. That is what I was handing over.
None of this was a polished industry yet. The people throwing these parties were figuring it out in real time, and they are the reason the enormous festival machine exists now. Working in techno was never a sound use of time or money either. Almost everyone doing it is doing it because they want to, not because the margins are good.
So the system had to convince people who were not designers to open Creative Suite 6 and not be afraid of it. I packaged everything, the same way I had packaged a snowboarding book for K2, links and fonts travelling with the document, every related asset pointing at the right place. The rule was that an asset has to stand on its own for somebody who cannot call me.
It held. A date change was thirty minutes, by someone else, at eleven at night, and it came back right.
Written down, the split sounds like ordinary delegation, and it is not, because it runs the opposite direction from how delegation usually goes. The reflex is to hand off the boring work so you can keep the interesting work. This was closer to the reverse: I handed off the part that would have consumed me and kept the part where a decision still had to be made.
I kept the judgment. I handed off the endurance.
The archive lays that out without me having to argue it. The monthly is a 24x36 snipe carrying four weekends at once. The weeklies are 11x17, one lineup each, same frame every time.
The working condition
A sheet of die-cut proofs in the archive carries the printer’s slug along its bottom edge: 6/19/14 8:44 PM. That is a Thursday night. The party was Sunday.
Everything below exists because of the gap between Thursday at 8:44 PM and Sunday afternoon, repeated every week for a summer.
One object, four selections
The fan is the same system as the flyer and the banner, cut into something you can hold. Four die-lines survive in the archive, and side by side they show what was decided once and what was selected weekly.
Same arc. Same white panel, same place, same angle. What moves is the crop taken from the Bosch and the colour the type gets pulled to, black on the first, green by the last.
Showing option 01 of 04
The source had to be real first
None of the handoff works if the thing being handed off is approximate.
The Bosch is the clearest example. A web JPEG of The Garden of Earthly Delights would have gone unquestioned by anyone printing an 11x17 for a Sunday party. Instead I pulled the gigapixel scan tile by tile and kept it: ten tiles between 119 and 144 MB each, plus a 222.9 MB composite and a 15,000 pixel derivative.
That was an afternoon of downloading and over a gigabyte of 2013 disk, and it was the cheap option. At 11x17 the difference between a web JPEG and the real scan is visible from across a room, and the detail was the entire reason for choosing that painting. Every weekly crop anyone made later came out of that source. If the source had been soft, every downstream execution would have been soft, and the person cropping it on a Thursday night would have had no way to know and no authority to fix it.
What handing it off actually required
theroof-layouts-051514.ai, 258.7 MB. A season of layouts held in one document, so each week’s
variation stayed visible against all the others. That is unfashionable and it is also the only way
I know to keep a hundred executions feeling related without them feeling identical. You cannot
check a system for drift if you can only see one week of it at a time.
theroof-digital-01-intro-v01.indd, 453.8 MB, for the digital side of the same run.
And a packaged InDesign folder carrying Links/ and Document fonts/ beside the document, with
the six faces it uses: Tungsten Bold, Tungsten Medium, Tungsten Compressed in Semibold, Book and
Medium, and Minion Pro.
That last one is the tell. Packaging a file is usually described as archival discipline. It is not. It is handoff discipline. You package a document because it is going to be opened on a machine that is not yours, by a person who does not have your font library, who is on a deadline, and who will not call you at midnight to ask where the links went. The fonts travel because the file leaves.
Where it held, and where it slipped
The season folder is the only audit of whether any of this worked, and it is just a directory listing.
Seven dated weekend folders, 0817 through 0928. Every one holds exactly three files: one 11x17
press PDF and two digital selects. Seven for seven. That part never moved, because it was
structural. A weekend was a folder and a folder was three files, and there was nothing to
remember.
The names are a different story. 0831 dropped the -PRESS suffix. 0928 came back as -v01.
0914’s digital selects are theroof-sept14-0.png and theroof-sept14-02.png, with sept where
every other week says sep and a bare 0 where every other week says 01. There is also a
SEPT folder sitting empty beside August, created once and never used, while every September
weekend stayed filed under August.
Then look at the artwork for those same weeks. Of the seven flyers that survive, August 31 and
September 28 are the only two missing #THEROOFBK at the foot of the left bar. The two weeks
where the filename slipped are the two weeks where the design slipped. Two for two, in a set of
seven.
Seven weeks is not a study, and this does not establish who touched what. What it answers is the question the handoff rests on: the system survived where it was structural and drifted where it depended on somebody remembering something at the end of a long night. The folder shape needed no discipline. The suffix and the hashtag needed a person to be careful, and twice out of seven the person was not.
The people were not the problem. The parts that needed remembering were.
What it cost, because it was not free
Building for handoff is slower than building for yourself. You name things for a stranger. You package. You resist the shortcut that only you would understand. The 258.7 MB file is the price of keeping the whole season visible at once, and it was a genuinely annoying file to open on a 2014 machine.
The split is also a judgment call that can go wrong in both directions. Classify something as repetition when it still needed a decision and what comes back is correct and lifeless. Classify it as judgment when it was only long and you have kept work that was never yours to keep. The correction is cheap while the file is still open and expensive once it is on a wall.
I would still make the same trade. The alternative was doing every date change myself, which means being the bottleneck on a hundred nights and having nothing left for the ones that mattered.
The same shape, with models
I now run a multi-agent development pipeline, and the architecture in it has a name I picked up much later: the gate and the wave.
The gate is the architectural contract plus one reference implementation, built end to end, properly, and never offloaded. The wave is the parallel mechanical work that imitates a decided pattern rather than making decisions. Nothing fans out until the gate exists.
That is what The Roof was. The gate was the contract: the two references, the type system in Tungsten and Minion, the Bosch treatment, one week done all the way through at full resolution. The wave was every subsequent week’s lineup change, executed by people who were not me, against a pattern that had already been decided.
The failure mode is identical in both cases. Hand off before the gate exists and what comes back is not obviously wrong. It is confidently wrong in a consistent way. It all looks like the system, because it was produced by imitating something, and nobody notices for weeks. That is true of a junior designer matching a flyer at midnight and it is true of a model generating the fortieth file in a fan out. The check has to live in the gate, because by the time the wave has run there is too much of it to check.
Nobody called any of this a design system at the time, and I was not reading anyone’s release notes about it. Even when it didn’t have a name, it was what I did.
This should not have worked
The Roof was not a bar with a patio and it was not an eighty person concert hall. Output, The Panther Room, and the Roof were two distinct rooms and the Roof had to fit in with that. There could be multiple events happening at the same time, different line ups, different vibes. Every. Single. Day of the Week.
That is the part people miss when they look at the Roof branding. The flyers look calm. The season was not calm. It was constant, it was loud, and the artwork had to keep up with a schedule nobody was controlling. The 24x36 wheatpaste covering a wall in Williamsburg and the 11x17 interior poster was always perfectly matched in quality and content to the Facebook event header and the underground ticketing site.
Which is funnier when you do the arithmetic. A 24x36 wheatpaste at 300dpi is 7200x10800. 78 megapixels. More than your iPhone as of the writing of this post. Stuck to plywood on North 6th where it will be rained on and pasted over inside a week.
The Facebook event image that week? Based on the 2014 spec, that clocked in at 784x295. That is a quarter of one megapixel. Same crop, same painting, same Thursday night, and about three hundred times the pixels going on the wall than going on the internet.
Thanks Bosch.
The painting I had no right to find
I was an art history geek with the old books still on the shelf, which is the only reason I went looking past the impressionists at all. Seurat gave us the Sunday afternoon. Bosch gave us everything Seurat could not: the excess, the fantasy, the moral chaos, a garden full of people behaving badly in beautiful light.
Then the part I still cannot believe. Google had scanned The Garden of Earthly Delights at gigapixel resolution and put it up free. Two point two gigabytes of it. Public domain, no licensing, no selects, no phone calls. I pulled it down tile by tile and kept the whole thing.
Without that file this is wallpaper. Cheap eighties linoleum in somebody’s mother’s kitchen, repeating and repeating until nobody sees it. With it, every week got a crop nobody had used yet, and the crops kept being good, because there was more painting in that file than there was season.
The detail is better than standing in front of it. You can see the cracks in the paint. You can see dust. Things that are not visible to a person in the room in Madrid are visible in the file.
Then I ran out of me
I had done the one month version of this project fifteen times. Dozens, if you count the revisions. Lineups changed, a headliner would drop, flights got missed, a Thursday event became a Friday party, and the market was competitive enough that none of it could just slide.
At some point the honest thing was to admit I could not keep doing every date change myself. I had other clients and my own career, and being the bottleneck on a hundred nights meant having nothing left for the ones that mattered.
So I taught the people who were already there. Not designers by training. The social side, the in-house crew, whoever was going to be awake at eleven on a Thursday. What they needed was not taste, it was a file that opened correctly on a machine that was not mine, with the fonts and the links already in it, and a rule for what could move and what could not.
I kept the wheatpastes, the monthlies, the big headliners, the things where a decision was still being made. They took the weekly lineup and the date changes.
They picked it up fast and the work was fine. Better than fine. It held for years, run by people who would not have called themselves designers.
What it turned into
The roof started as a smoking area. That is all it was. When it became a Sunday party we capitalised the T and the R and made it a name, and the name had to live inside a room that was already extremely designed: the ornate, complicated, salvaged DDR fixtures, the lighting pulled out of a junkyard in Berlin and wired back up in Brooklyn.
Matching a system that specific is what made it last. The Bosch treatment ran for a season or three. The type and the lockup outlived it and became the identity for the rest of the club’s run, from the middle of 2014 until it closed.
It also grew things nobody planned. End of season zines. Promotional fans, which were expensive and which we made anyway, because Shawn was unapologetic about that kind of thing. To hell with it, it is awesome, we are doing it.
I miss that club.
More on Output
The closing was covered widely enough that the club’s weight does not rest on my account of it. Interview Magazine and The New York Times are further up this page. These are the rest.
The first two are the only ones about The Roof rather than the club around it. The season announcement dates the rooftop’s sixth summer to 2018, which puts the first in 2013 and the identity above still running on the last one.
The Grub Street listing is the useful one for a different reason. It ranks Output first among clubs in New York, and when it walks the building it names the roof as one of the rooms, up a back staircase, with the Manhattan skyline behind it. That is a best-of-New-York entry describing the room this identity was made for.
- We Own The Nite NYC
- ROOFTOP SEASON: OUTPUT Announces 2018 Lineup for The Roof (opens in a new tab)
- Grub Street, New York Magazine
- The Absolute Best Clubs in New York, with Output at number one (opens in a new tab)
- Brooklyn Paper
- Last dance: Williamsburg club Output will close with blowout New Year's Eve bash (opens in a new tab)
- Resident Advisor
- Output, New York City (opens in a new tab)
- Sound Investment AV
- Output: the room and the sound system build (opens in a new tab)