Anytown, Anywhere

It’s been over ten years since the ubiquitous Believe banners papered Baltimore as part of then Mayor O’Malley’s campaign to curb drug use and bolster neighborhoods. While remnants of it and ghosts of city campaigns past (“The Greatest City in America,” “The City that Reads,” “Get In On It”) can still be found in office windows and fading on wooden benches, let’s consider what a new brand for Baltimore would look like. Is it even possible to harness the pride and history of a place so riddled with disparities?

Branding a place, rather than a company or thing, is en vogue. Even 35 years after its introduction, Milton Glaser’s I Love New York campaign generates more than $30 million a year. Not to mention the link many people believe it had in curbing New York’s crime epidemic of the early 1980s. In light of national tragedies and disconnected citizens, there is a lot of talk these days about building communities and being a better neighbor.

Going beyond giving a city a campaign with a logo and color scheme, Robbie de Villiers and Jeremy Dooley created a typeface for the city of Chattanooga, TN to give visitors a sense of Chattanooga’s entrepreneurial potential and creative spirit. Chaface the typeface appears on city signage and documents, and is available for download after watching a short video about the designer’s vision of its usage.

From their winning Kickstarter page: “Chattanooga boasts a burgeoning design community, a music scene that’s playing some fierce catch-up, and a culture of entrepreneurship that’s gaining national attention. With around 500,000 people, Chattanooga is at that right developmental stage to adopt and embrace a strong, city-wide visual identity.”

Couldn’t the same (exact) thing be said about Baltimore? A typeface solution is an innovative approach which could easily be overlooked by non-designers. There are plenty of artistic types living in Bmore, but I don’t see a city movement rallying behind serifs and x-heights.

AIGA Toledo partnered with the Arts Commission of Greater Toledo to develop a city campaign during a national glass conference. Regional artists designed 100 three-foot “dots” with QR codes and placed them throughout the city. An app was developed for users to collect the dots and receive information about each particular location. Incentives were given to those who collected at least 25 dots.

My favorite aspect was the amazing responses we got from Toledoans who fell in love with their city all over again.

While the “You Are Here” concept isn’t incredibly original, the campaign proved itself with some impressive metrics:

• 139 App downloads the first day

• 832 total App downloads

• 3,791 unique site visitors

• 8,597 dot detail page views from mobile devices

When the Baltimore Area Convention & Visitors Association rebranded Baltimore to tourists in 2008, it hired branding mogul Landor to create the look. Visit Baltimore (as they are now known) performed a huge disservice to the local design and advertising community, who live and work and breathe here, by outsourcing the task (read: paying a lot of money) to a global firm with offices beyond our state’s borders. I’ve discovered that sometimes people need to spend a lot of money on something to feel like they are getting something of value.

Because Baltimore has very unique and contrasting neighborhoods, perhaps it would be more effective and create more social change if we develop micro-brands of our communities instead. Selling Baltimore to outsiders looks different than selling Baltimore to insiders. If we asked our neighborhoods to consider the nuances of their home within the city and ask what that looks like, we’d get to know our neighbors and encourage a sense of pride bolder than with branding the city as a whole.

What’s your tagline for Baltimore, or for your neighborhood? Let Baltimoreans brand Baltimore. Tweet #brandbmore, @ChangEngine to tell us what Baltimore’s slogan should be!