The Design System, for the City of Chicago, captures the historical and symbolic strength of the existing Chicago flag and codifies it into a contemporary, efficient and free architecture for the entire citizenry of Chicago to participate and build-upon (the goal being, to help bring the city of Chicago together through it’s brand identity).
We worked closely with the Mayor’s Office to develop a simple, but elegant, toolkit which would allow public officials (at any level and for any department) to easily access common design assets (eg. image libraries, color palettes, logo/lock-ups, typefaces, etc), high-level instructions/templates and examples of how-best to assemble them for a wide range of potential projects (from seasonal/cultural marketing events, municipal signage, uniforms, vehicle graphics, etc).
We developed a custom typeface, called Big Shoulders (inspired by Chicago’s famous architecture) and made it a free Google font so that every city worker would have access to Chicago’s ‘new voice.’
On March 4th, 2020… we launched the new identity (hand-in-hand with Mayor Lori Lightfoot), at a press-conference celebrating the Chicago’s 183rd birthday (Fast Company published an article, estimating the city could save tax payers as much as $10 million dollars by adopting the new system).
In many ways, the timing couldn’t have been better, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged… the City of Chicago has been using the new Design System to help organize public health and safety information in their digital/social presence as-well-as wide scale public PSAs (the new brand identity projects professionalism, credibility, organization, reliability and trust, at a time when all the people of Chicago need it most).
- Creative Director, Ogilvy
- Steve Hahn
- Executive Design Director, Ogilvy
- Gabe Usadel
- Deputy Chief Creative Officer, Ogilvy Worldwide
- Joe Sciarrotta
- Designer, Ogilvy
- Charlotte Petertil
- Designer, Ogilvy
- Sho Watanabe
- Director of Design, City of Chicago
- Jason Kunesh
- President, House of Pretty, Ltd.
- Patric King
- Senior Digital Project Manager, Ogilvy
- Philip Puleo
- Vice President, Ogilvy
- Amysue Martens
- Associate Strategy Director, Ogilvy
- Annette Perfetti
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