This year, Black Friday will be a “Bright Friday” for the community of Northside.
Up and down Hamilton Avenue, businesses will unveil fun and funky new signs that bedazzle
Northside’s main drag. In an unlikely collaboration of 11 businesses, local artists, several zoning officials and one museum, the
CoSign project is now a proven success in creating attractive, cohesive street signage with hopes to shape future signage projects in city neighborhoods locally and across the nation.
What started as a broader grant application to ArtPlace America for several city neighborhoods became a personal quest for Northsiders after the city-wide application went unfunded last spring.
Stepping up with funding support, the
Haile US Bank Foundation, Northside partners and the
American Sign Museum created a pilot project that paired local businesses and visual artists with sign fabricators to design and install a critical mass of new signage along Hamilton Avenue.
With an idealistic launch date of November 23, this year’s Black Friday, Eric Avner knew this would be a challenge. “We wanted to do multiple things at once,” says Avner, vice president and senior program manager of the Haile/US Bank Foundation. “Help the sign museum, help local business districts gain vitality and give the creative sector of Cincinnati more opportunities to make a living.”
The American Sign Museum played a vital role in the project, serving as the primary grant recipient and providing staff as content specialists for the design process. The museum held two August training workshops for artists and businesses, put together a team of professional sign fabricators and installers, and participated in a judging panel to decide upon the best signage proposals from business/artist teams.
“Part of our mission is to educate the public and special interest groups about signs,” says Tod Swormstedt, founder of the American Sign Museum. “The workshops helped to educate the business owners on why signage is so important for marketing, as well as to educate artists about what is a good sign. Artists may create an aesthetically-pleasing sign, but it may not identify the business well.”
The week before their unveiling, the American Sign Museum displayed the signage in its brand-new facility near Camp Washington at 1330 Monmouth Street.
CoSign documented the progress of the project from start to finish with help from
The Queen City Project so other communities have the opportunity to replicate the project and broadcast their own creativity and collaborative spirit through signage. And the sign museum plans to go after that ArtPlace grant again - the one it lost just a few short months ago.
Says Swormstedt, “The application is much stronger now, given the learning curve we experienced, the lessons learned and the project’s success.”
By Becky Johnson
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