In 2019, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) and The City of Revere collaborated on a policy and planning blueprint to shape the city’s future over the next 10-20 years. In January of 2020, the final draft of the Next Stop Revere Master Plan was released, underlining a comprehensive plan for the future of Revere’s tourism industry. The next step was to design a visual identity, one that encompassed the City of Revere and its character. The essential question — What does Next Stop Revere look like? Thus, a community design progress began. Kristina Lamour Sansone of Design Instinct Learning LLC and Professor of Design at Lesley University, was recruited to streamline the collaborative design process.
Through her long history of community-based graphic design projects including The Visual Identity Project working in collaboration with middle school students at the Cambridge Friends School in Massachusetts to design the school logo, Sansone was a perfect addition to bring the image of Revere to life.
To accentuate the community connection, Kristina invited Lesley Graphic Design student, Cahel Saintil and Lesley Graphic Design graduate, Catie Woodbury to the design team. While quarantined, Catie and Cahel, both Revere residents, completed community-based projects for a course called Visual Communication 1, making them adept co-leaders of the design process.
Cahel’s visual research for the Rumney Marsh in Visual Communication 1, is now leading user-experience and user-interface and design systems for the project. “Bringing visions to life is what I do as a designer. Revere has always been a hidden gem to me and I intended on sharing that with the world when working on this project,” said Cahel.
“I got involved in the project because of the cross over of my hometown and the beauty that comes with it,” said Catie, whose photography inspired the vision of the bridge as the V and clock as the O. She conceived this design concept while having coffee and viewing the bridge. She is currently developing a graphic mark from this photograph as one of the many Next Stop Revere logo designs.
Sketches and prototypes to show the rotating system of design elements.
The result: A visual identity system for the City of Revere to include community-crowdsourced design elements such as historical photographs, sports, food, nature and more to be used on the website, social media, products and social media. The process becomes an entryway for residents to introduce themselves to the city and to represent who they are and what images from the community are important to them.
(replace with Catie’s new studies)
This is the first of many Next Stop Revere logos within the new system. If you or your business wants to contribute, contact Jennifer (email here).
Special thanks to the rest of the team: Lou Spagnola, Laura Christopher, Olga Tacure, and Bob Haas.