29 April 2020

In Which I Design A Logo For A Candidate That Could Win An Election

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I did this some weeks ago, and I can't understand why I didn't boast about it. The client seems pretty happy with it.

First a word about Metro. We have this regional government here in greater Portland and it's simply called Metro. It's a unique thing, something no other collection of governments do anywhere else in the United States. There are still cities and counties (an armful of the former and three of the latter) in this area of Oregon and they operate independently of Metro but they also operate interdependently with Metro. Metro, as summed up by Wikipedia, does this:

Metro is the regional government for the Oregon portion of the Portland metropolitan area. It is the only directly elected regional government and metropolitan planning organization in the United States. Metro is responsible for managing the Portland region's solid waste system, coordinating the growth of the cities in the region, managing a regional parks and natural areas system, and overseeing the Oregon Zoo, Oregon Convention Center, Portland's Centers for the Arts, and the Portland Expo Center. It also administers the Regional Illegal Dumping Patrol or RID Patrol which is tasked with cleaning up illegal dumping and it is the designated point of contact for citizens to report illegal dumping in the Portland metro area.

So, Metro provides some of the common bones for what is a colony creature made of of three very large Oregon counties who have their own ideas about how to go and grow. Crazily, it works, but that's the way we Oregonians tend to look at things.

A good friend is involved with the campaign of a man running for the Metro commission, district 3, which is an area which encompasses a large swath of the southwest metro: cities like Wilsonville, Tigard, Tualatin, a big part of Beaverton, and the areas both incorporated and unincorporated adjacent to them. This candidate is Gerritt Rosenthal, and my brief was as kind as it was loose; I was provided with kind of a virtual vision board, a collection of files of some already-extant ideas, background designs and such. they provided a sense of color and style and allowed me to home in on a key design element and a palette to use.

This was the design I developed:

 

The tree was the key element and it brought the heart of everything I saw in the various files together. The palette drew on all the cool blues and greens I saw, and the type went for a solid yet friendly feel. How I settled on letting the tree come up through the G, I couldn't tell you; I thought the two should entwine and just went with the idea. It come out divinely, I thought.

Application used was Inkscape with some support from GIMP. It was rather fun. And should Gerritt win ... and Willamette Week has endorsed him so he has a chance ... at least I'd have the pride of being able to say I contributed a bit.

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