As part of the A. Philip Randolph Square Neighborhood Alliance’s (the Neighborhood Alliance) brand development, the organization needed a logo that would serve as the point of identification for our organization; a compelling visual symbol that would trigger memories of the work we do. We owe a debt of generosity to one of our key advisors, Deacon Charles Powell, who presented our fledgling organization with a rare opportunity to collaborate with an A-list multicultural advertising firm, Elite Media, LLC, founded by Christopher Crawford, a 15-year veteran of the marketing and advertising industry.
In creating the logo for our organization, Mr. Crawford assigned the project to a creative team, which included designers, graphic artists, and writers who generously volunteered their time and resources during a series of meetings with project leaders from the Neighborhood Alliance that were held at the firm’s modern, minimalist headquarters in Central Harlem. Working under the creative leadership of Mr. Crawford, his A-team created several concepts of logos as part of the “brand identity development” package that was produced as a gift-in-kind to the Neighborhood Alliance.
The inspiration for the logo was a watercolor produced by a local watercolorist Lynn Liberman who earlier had been commissioned by our sister organization NYC HDFC to create a series of watercolors of building facades of tenant-owned cooperatives in our district. Using the watercolor as inspiration, the creative team was able to identify three visual elements that could be found in each of the six greenspaces in the Neighborhood Alliance: a focal point, the shape of the site, and a grand avenue that intersects all six of the sites in the Neighborhood Alliance but one.
The first logo concept was a simple seal, which was modified as indicated in the images below. Later drafts of the logo would evolve to include a trapezoid to signify the shapes of the greenspaces in our alliance, a circle to signify the focal points of each of the sites, and a diagonal line cutting through both the focal point and and the shape of the site representing Saint Nicholas Avenue, the grand avenue that symbolically unifies the six green spaces into a neighborhood alliance.
