In 2015, a group of Traverse City residents and business owners decided to organize. The organization was dubbed the North Boardman Lake District; its goal was to foster intentional development along the 8th Street corridor, and (subsequently, in 2018) to join the Traverse City Downtown Development Authority.
This meant they needed to present a united visual front in correspondences, marketing materials, and other media. They needed to appear professional, trustworthy and capable. They also wanted to pay homage to the area they sought to represent. They had a logo, but by 2017 some of the members felt strongly that it could use updating. It had low contrast and high detail in places which would have made smaller applications hard to deal with.
I worked to distill the important elements of the existing mark (the white sailboats which crowd Boardman Lake in the summertime, and the silhouettes of the Traverse Area District Library and the Depot building which houses the Filling Station Microbrewery) into a more contemporary mark which was suited to a wider array of applications. I used thick lines and simpler shapes for improved visibility, then provided an alternate format (not shown here) for applications where vertical space was limited, or where the text in the full “Badge” logo became too small to read easily. Several alternate versions of the mark (shown above) were created to help cement the district’s preferred use-name, “NOBO,” and to reinforce its association with the main logo.
The NBLD was welcomed into the DDA in 2019, and has been involved in several large-scale development projects involving the improvement of 8th Street. I also had the privilege of creating materials for the Oct. 2019 grand re-opening event, called Apples on 8th…you can read more about that project here!
