City of Cincinnati
During Spring and Fall semesters of 2024, I had the opportunity to co-op at the City of Cincinnati’s Department of Transportation and Engineering as a graphic design intern. I had the opportunity to work on a wide variety of projects across multiple disciplines of design, including gateway design, wayfinding, placemaking, and branding. Below, I’ve highlighted a project in which I designed signage for CUF neighborhoods.
Goal
Design a system of visually connected totems to be installed in three Cincinnati neighborhoods: Clifton Heights, University Heights, and Fairview.
Location Plan
Before beginning the design process, a plan was made for where the signs would be placed. We wanted to prioritize placing signs along the most trafficked vehicular paths leading into the neighborhoods.
Existing Assets
The City of Cincinnati had previously created some signage and branding for Clifton Heights, one of the neighborhoods included in CUF. We used these assets as reference in order to create a cohesive visual narrative in the neighborhoods.
Ideation
Concept Refinement
Following the ideation phase, we refined four directions to include in a presentation to the community. Additionally, two more sign types were designed to represent the additional neighborhoods: University Heights and Fairview. To create a cohesive system of signage, pattern and color were used to differentiate neighborhood, while shape and form remained the same. The patterns were derived from notable architecture in each neighborhood.
Dimensional Renders
To give the community members a better sense of the physical aspects of the totems, we developed a series of 3D renders of the signs using Blender and Adobe Dimensions.
Final Brand Assets
Following a meeting with the community, members decided on Design B from the presented selection.
Final Elevations
We reduced the overall size of the totem, and a second sign type was created for the location where Fairview and Clifton Heights border each other.
User Experience Journey
Finally, to give the community a sense of how the signage system would look in the environment, we visited the sign locations and collected photos for reference of scale and placed elevations of the signs in the environment at an accurate size.