2023
Visual Identity System:
Eau Claire
A place branding project for a Calgary Neighbourhood
Skills
Design Research, Concept Development, Branding, and Product Development
Tools
Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Mural, and Google Sites
Goal
Create a comprehensive visual identity system to reflect the spirit, culture and feeling of Eau Claire—a Calgary neighnourhood known for its urban parkland and memory-filled events.
Project Overview
A visual identity system is a collection of visual elements that represent and differentiate a brand—capturing the complex nature of a product, service or place. For Eau Claire, we were tasked with thoroughly researching and experiencing the community to find its unique characteristics that would later shape the place brand. We were challenged to create a visual identity system that reflected the past, present and highly anticipated future of Eau Claire with the city’s plans to develop the community in the upcoming years.
This project includes extensive research gathered through a variety of research methods, a style guide, community newsletter, mockups, and a documentation of our design process. This project was completed in collaboration with Cordelia Lee.
To view the full project, visit: https://sites.google.com/mtroyal.ca/eauclaireyyc/home
Process
Design Research
To gain a comprehensive understanding of the Eau Claire neighbourhood, we approached the research in a variety of ways. From making visits to the community ourselves to gain a first hand understanding of what Eau Caire offers to speaking with locals and community residents about their experiences and thoughts on the neighbourhood. The insights gathered from this research helped us define what Eau Claire meant to the people of Calgary.
Our methods of research included desk research, interviews, a public engagement activity, photo ethnography, a survey and the completion of observational framework activities.
Concept Development
In this stage, we began to develop the foundational ideas and visuals that would best reflect our findings. First we brainstormed personality characteristics that we thought best represented how people interacted with the community. This helped define the abstract tone and spirit of the community, which in turn would guide the development of the visual identity system.
We found that Eau Claire encourages open-mindedness and curiosity as people see it as a place of learning, expression, and fluidity with its constantly changing environment. For the concept statement, we wanted to communicate the feeling of discovery that people experience when they walk through Prince’s Island, go to a festival, or have a picnic with friends.
Now that we created a more tangible concept for Eau Claire, it was time to work towards the visual elements that would reflect our concept statement. With this, I gathered inspiration for the different components of the visual identity system such as the colour palette, logo and newsletter.
Sketching
The next step was to apply elements of the concept and visual inspiration to sketch out some logo ideas for Eau Claire. The elements of the logo needed to represent aspects of the concept statement and identity of the neighbourhood.
Moving forward with some of the sketches, we digitized potential logos on Adobe Illustrator. Our finalized logo represents the ways in which the mind wanders and discovers—like a spark of amazement when you see something exciting.
Style Guide
With our concept and logo, we created the complementary visual elements that would form the rest of the style guide. This included logo variations, clear space rules, minimum size rules, typefaces, a colour palette, icons and patterns, and image treatment guidelines. These are meant to ensure visual consistency between different applications of the place brand.
Brand Application
To showcase how our full visual identity system can be used, I created a newsletter that included information on the community itself, a community map, and adheres to the rules of the style guide. This document was created on Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop.
Along with the newsletter, we created mockups to showcase the brand in different ways. This includes mockups for print, products, digital and community signage.
