I worked on the brand and website for a new initiative in Rhode Island, The Providence Commemoration Lab. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and the American Rescue Plan, The Providence Commemoration Lab is a program co-administered by The Department of Art, Culture and Tourism (ACT) and the Rhode Island Historical Society (RIHS). The Lab sites and stages new, temporary projects on public property that invite unexpected ways of understanding commemoration as a communal process of historical redress and spatial reclamation.
The concept began with pilcrows, the symbol for “new paragraph” or, a break. The “P” (for Providence) is looking back (to history). I wondered, “What happens if the ”P” (the State) is not knocked down as some monuments are, but rather, opts to self-rotate; to explore a shift?” The result was a new small glyph evocative of a dwelling. Perhaps an observatory, library, or contemporary arts center.
The typeface for the pilcrow is Dynamo, perhaps known from the “Wayne’s World” logo. It’s fun, youthful, and bold—part of a general American pop-culture lexicon. The title font is DX Hfl Std, developed in Korea and to the best I can tell, is not intended for everyday English use. It felt very “USA” to have these paired. They just work well together.
I began looking at violets because despite being the state flower, it felt unique for Rhode Island. The majority of the state’s nonprofits have logos rooted in blue and green, and a few years back residents here almost universally decided they were not into being represented with red and orange. Purples and violets were the range left to explore.
“Purple is the last color on the spectrum...It’s the color of being present and not being present. It’s symbolic of that boundary of being and not being, seeing and not seeing. It’s a powerful color in that.” — Victoria Finlay quoted in, “In the wake of Prince’s death, a very short history of the color purple,” LA Times, 2016
So the logo is, perhaps, an observatory. We look back across time to understand our present.In spiral galaxies such as our own Milky Way we find a world of vibrating violets and blues, which I refined to a few brand colors with the help of the early internet. In the 90s, most consumer-grade displays could display a max of 256 colors, and web designers were encouraged to stick to a specific list of 216 "web-safe" colors to ensure consistency. Providence Commemoration Lab’s brand colors were derived by looking at this color set alongside images of spiral galaxies.
Lastly, I built the website using Wordpress / Elementor. The main goal of the build was to ensure project staff can easily update and edit with little fuss. The site is intentionally minimal, a throwback design to the tumblr era with some modern tweaks like smooth-expanding accordion menus. Images sourced for it came from the city or Wikicommons—shared cultural knowledge. I picked IBM Plex Mono as the main font as it’s well-tested, reads great, and adds a very slight ‘tech’ feel to pair with the ‘observatory’ logo.