A corporate and emotional identity for your city
4January 19, 2008 by Colin
If you were challenged to describe the spirit and atmosphere of your home town, could you single out a palette of colours that would immediately seem familiar and evocative?
Todd Falkowsky has distilled the colours of each and every provincial and territorial capital – including Ottawa. That’s his Pantone colour palette for the city, which I’ve illustrated with pictures
If anything, the colours he’s singled out for St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador, seem too muted. Check for yourself.
[tags] Pantone, Ottawa, Falkowsky, Walrus [/tags]
I thought he pegged the ‘Peg perfectly.
Although the Ottawa colours elicit a dry, “Ho, ho, bland old Ottawa” I think the choices are a bit off.
It’s the darker greens in the Parliament roof that make it interesting, not the pistachio sorbet highlight colour shown. And washy slate blue/grey doesn’t seem to represent the Canal very well. But the Sussex Drive shade is spang on, and could indeed represent most buildings in the downtown.
It’s too bad we can’t see all the photos used as the basis for each selection. It would be interesting to see where the line fell between his computer’s selections and the “intuitive element” he mentions in the project’s description.
Interesting how the blue and the green in the Ottawa palette aren’t too far off the blue and green used in the city’s logo – http://ottawa.ca/images/header/ottawa_logo.png
Coincidence?
[...] Aside: I noticed also that one of the frequent contributors to this blog is Todd Falkowsky, Creative Director at Motherbrand and a prof at OCAD. I thought I recognized the name, and a few minutes poking around the internets confirmed that my memory does indeed serve. More significantly, his students think he’s great. [...]