Connecting the City of Chicago
Ensuring that the work of an entire organization is centralized – and subsequently made visible to everyone – is key in creating quality brand touchpoints. This is the story about how the City of Chicago championed brand operations.
As the City of Chicago set out to do a major rebrand project, its goal was to guarantee that the revitalized brand would be managed centrally, allowing the entirety of the city’s stakeholders – coworkers, partners, nonprofits, you name it – to access and continually co-create it. They also wanted to make sure that the messaging was on point, generating a better sense of brand recognition with their various touchpoints.
We met with Jason Kunesh, City of Chicago’s Design Director.
“Frontify really helped us in three major ways: it helped us save money, create a brand home that had inclusion naturally built into it, and devise clear city messages that people could really understand.”
City of Chicago’s first initial use case with Frontify was to apply it as a straight-out brand management tool, making sure its brand strategy was executed in the right way. However, after rolling the rebrand material out, they saw a number of additional benefits that didn’t make the initial wishlist; for example, a dedicated space for photography and a place to store and iterate on print designs – features their brand can adopt as their needs and usage continue to grow.
The use of a centralized brand management platform put an end to a lot of confusion and questions, such as back and forth emails asking about specific materials, or frequent asks for access rights to personal folders; the kind of things that become a real nuisance.
“Frontify made it really easy for us to understand and control our assets, and share them across the city. Regardless of where you sit in the city; if you’re a partner, non-profit partner, or business partner – it’s easy for us to share the right thing at the right time.”
Seeing things come alive in Frontify made their team feel proud and confident. Normally, as a designer, you can see your own individual contribution in a project, but it’s hard to get a sense of how that work stacks up across the whole organization – with several different stakeholders sitting in different places. To see the full spectrum of contributions coming together in one place, from everyone involved, really shows the power of what a collection of skilled designers can achieve when focusing their efforts through one collaborative platform.
