City of Durham

The Project

Allieway won work to update the City of Durham’s logo and create a new internal and external brand and communications standards manual. The goal for this project was to conduct an audit of the current logo, department logos, and manuals to determine what was or was not successful and to make adjustments based on our findings to support the City’s desire to reflect the City’s current core values and community.

The Result

We knew that this project would require Allieway to update the brand and brand elements of the City to match the
ever changing, ever growing, and ever thriving community. Therefore, we began with conducting internal and external key stakeholder interviews. From these interviews we discovered several important items including that the current logo was not oriented in a way that was flexible or usable

for internal departments or outside partners. As it was, the logo was extremely horizontal, with a tagline that, as we discovered in our interviews, no longer accurately described the City. We also discovered that the use of five colors in the logo made it both expensive and challenging to reproduce. We also learned that other departments did not have a way to co-brand with the logo. As a result of our findings, we updated the logo to be more flexible through the following:

• Tweaked the design to be less horizontal and updated the proportions of the logo elements to be more appealing to the eye
• Removed the tagline “City of Medicine” and the incorporation date – based on our findings, neither elevated or represented the City
• Reduced the colors used in the logo from five to four to make it easier and cost effective to reproduce
  Created a vertical logo to make the brand more flexible for internal and external use
• Designed logo-lockups for each department
  • An issue we discovered was that some departments were trying to create their own logos that were not adhering to the branding requirements of the City. In response, Allieway created a uniform logo for each department as well as an updated policy in the brand manual that clearly indicates the appropriate use of all branding.