A digital refresh of
City of Santa Monica
This was a large rebranding project for the city, as they needed to become a 21st-century digital town hall. It was an honor to be a part of such an iconic city rebrand and to face a variety of challenges, ranging from pitching brand concepts to auditing the information architecture for all department sites on santamonica.gov.
My Roles
Brand Concept
Brand Identity
UI Design
Information Architecture
Agency
Edenspiekermann
Duration
1 year (2018-2019)
Brand Concept
Defining a new face for a city was a long and iterative process. It was a collaborative effort to come up with a three solid brand concepts that captures the City's dynamic and vibrant energy:
(Left to right) Juxtaposition, An Electric Blue, and Dynamic Shapes
Evolution of the bay symbol
Our team went through a multiple rounds of redrawing the original logo from evolution to revolution -- evolution being closest to the original logo to revolution being the most transformative.
At the end, the City chose the evolution version in which the original bay mark has visual equity that is unique and recognizable as Santa Monica. The new logomark evolves the symbol to reflect the core brand values of the City while retaining the charm of the original.
Drag the bar from left to right to see the before and after of the bay symbol elements.
Shapes of the city
A brand concept that we landed after several iterations, captures the variety of colors, shapes, and patterns found throughout the city, from the pier to the sidewalk, to bring the City's energy into the visual language.
Information Architecture / Sitemap Audit
With over 22,000 contents in the site, we reorganized the contents from department-centric to topic-centric that is more intuitive for users to navigate. From the IA concept defined by our UX team, we went through an extensive process of auditing the sitemap of santamonica.gov and its department and programs' microsites.
UI Concepts and Maintanable Page Templates
With the newly defined look and feel of the city, I was tasked to design UI concepts that carries on the branding and also design page templates can be easily maintable by the content owners.
