We were asked by the City of Sarasota to come up with concepts for the new branding initiative of the Downtown Improvement District (DID) and that Anand Pallegar of atLarge would be the liaison/presenter. We created six different concepts including the selected update to the current WE ARE DOWNTOWN SARASOTA.

After conducting an informal focus group, it was concluded that WE’RE worked better than WE ARE. WE’RE represented an invitation or welcoming to the customer/visitor whereas the WE ARE was more focussed on the merchants/businesses. From these insights we were able create a distinctive mark using the location pin as the apostrophe. We then developed a full presentation of banners, signage, and advertising for all six districts.

 The DID board later made a decision to not to proceed with the program due to unresolved issues between different areas of the downtown district. The presented images are the original concept sketches.