BRAND & IDENTITY
downtown duluth arts walk
Art Direction: Joellyn Rock
Project Lead & Design: Paula Rolf
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Downtown Duluth Arts Walk is an event that takes place seasonally, four times a year, to celebrate the art that is in Downtown Duluth, Minnesota. It’s goal is to high Duluth’s vibrant art community across disciplines which includes music, dancing, ceramics, and digital media. The original logo became an important symbol for the arts walk, but it no longer served the needs of the organization. An important part of the new identity was to highlight artists that are associated with the arts walk without taking away the symbolism that became so important to the overall brand.
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To develop a new brand identity that could focus on highlighting the artists associated with the arts walk and still resemble a part of the original brand.
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Develop a fresh brand identity while maintaining parts of the original brand that became so important to the organization. Responsibilities included design and typography research, concept exploration, and designing supporting assets for the upcoming arts walk.
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Choosing and building off of a typeface that could have imagery within the letters to showcase local art and building off of the existing well-known logo.
Final logo
Brand typography
Primary typeface: Chuck
Secondary typeface: Fira Sans
Brand applications
Poster
Rack card (front)
Rack card (back)
Process
An important part of this project was to create a new logo and brand that still held a lot of significance within the DDAW community. The logo wasn’t created digitally, meaning that came with a lot of ease of use issues that would be solved with the rebrand.
Original logo
The original logo (pictured left) became an important symbol for the arts walk, but it no longer served the needs of the organization since it wasn’t digital. An important part of the new identity was to highlight artists that are associated with the arts walk without taking away the symbolism that became so strongly associated with the brand like the streetlamp or the downtown skyline.
Sketches
Typography exploration
Typography cutouts
