It's time to get excited about urban planning and city infrastructure.
Graphic Designer
The Wharton Future of Cities Conference is an annual city planning conference held at the University of Pennsylvania.
For years the audience has primarily been thought leaders, professors, and government officials. As the conferences audience has grown a new demographic has begun to emerge with graduate students and individuals in the mid twenties.
As a freelance graphic designer I was tasked with redesigning the brand identity of the conference and breathing new life into their outdated design system. The final deliverables included a new palette, typeface, logo, social assets, and physical merchandise.
How can we design a delightful user expereince, cohesive brand identity, and social strategy that is both flexible and simple for an aged audience and growing younger userbase.
The Goal
For the logo I took two approaches. The first approach took elements from urban planning such as housing infrastructure, building heatmaps, and weather maps to guide my thinking. The client asked for a 3D option that would be appropriate as a .gif for their website and social deliverables.
the second logo was at the special request of the client for a Scandinavian inspired flat mark. For this approach I once again explored symbols from urban planning such as traffic signs and crosswalks to create a system of symbols that could be used to form the conference title.
The Logo
For the palette, a number of requests from the contractor, as well as the brand image, were taken into consideration. The conference is highly academic, and its general audience is both older in age and more professionally inclined. For this reason, the palette was designed to be mostly neutral colors for visibility and softness. At the same time, a breath of fresh air was needed to make the conference feel a bit more ‘fun’ while still maintaining a professional tone and effectively conveying some of the major themes: technology (purple), nature (green), humanity (blue), and infrastructure (orange).
Similar to the justifications used for the palette, the most important consideration for the typeface was that it be highly legible and simple. Additionally, the accessibility of the font to the client was another factor taken into account at their request, so I sought one that could be easily found on Adobe. Neue Haas Grotesk by Christian Schwartz fit this criteria perfectly. Sans-serif typefaces are also contemporary, cutting-edge, and cosmopolitan—qualities the brand aims to convey.
Typeface and Font
With the two logos built out and approved, the next step was to create marketing materials for the conference. Physical merchandise is as simple as slapping the logos on the appropriate deliverables but for the social and print posters I wanted to make a design system that could be easily used by the next user once I was gone.
I created a system of templates that could easily be edited and contain the proper branding elements to subtly reference the brand system I created.
Merchandise and Advertising