I have mentioned the Toronto-based journal Spacing before in this weblog, and even was fortunate enough to acquire a set of their subway buttons while there recently. Spacing is a journal that looks critically at the everyday conditions of the city of Toronto, featuring musing about that city's sense of place, and their buttons are a clever way to imbue shared, banal space and place with newfound identity. That seems to me like a very clear example of new ground being broken in the gray area between marketing, design, and planning.
Anyway, upon opening up the Sunday edition of the Toronto Star I came across this article, written by a PhD student at NYU whose dissertation focuses on tourism and place branding. (I think you will probably have to register with the website for access to the article, but it's free.) She decodes the brand identities of a number of cities, including Toronto, in the article...
...Meanwhile, a free postcard in a restaurant had coincidentally just caught my eye that asked, "Is Toronto too big, too small, or just the right size?" sponsored by something calling itself the Toronto Branding Project, found on the web at www.wearetoronto.ca. A little internet digging reveals the results of the hip outreach efforts, the new scheme that renames the city "Toronto Unlimited," of which the author of the Star article, Melissa Aronczyk, is not fond, for reasons that she will tell you. The postcards themselves, though, from a graphic point of view were fantastic, much like an IPod ad with a pencil outline of a human shape: a visual cue for you to fill in the remaining information...for you to be involved in the eventual resultant image and concept.
I want a job doing this.
(sidenote: free link to many of the articles contained in a new journal titled Place Branding, mentioned in the enRoute article in the previous post. I haven't read them yet but figure I will have downtime at work to do so.)
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