## The Brief The project started out simple enough. The college president planned on sharing his strategic vision for the next five years of the college, and he needed something to show the community. The objective was to provide a poster and a bookmark listing the goals of the strategic vision. ## Developing the Visual Identity Before work can begin on these physical artifacts, I took a step back to understand what those strategic goals were and what they meant to the college. I thought about the college’s core values and how both could be presented. Forward momentum was the initial idea that was proposed, but I wanted a second idea to work with. While I developed and presented both, ultimately I recommended the second one, the one presented here. In my practice I often rely on word association to come up with ideas. I will take a word, a theme, a phrase and I’ll break them down. I look for definitions, synonyms, metaphors. I look for cultural relevance and history. I’ll then break those down, again and again, until I form a web or matrix of meaning. Being “inclusive” was one of the strategic goals and I felt there was potential in this one word. What does it mean to *be* inclusive? Inclusivity is encompassing, and I imagined a circle growing wider, enveloping more as it grows larger. In contrast to forward momentum, where movement is linear, expansion moves outward in all directions. I then researched modes of expansion and came upon nature and the Golden Ratio. Pitzer’s core value of environmental sustainability lead me to the word “nature”, and I wanted to frame Pitzer’s strategic growth as a natural fundamental phenomenon. In plants, the Golden Ratio is present in phyllotaxis—the efficient way that leaves spiral out from the center of a sunflower or succulent. I thought phyllotaxis would make a great image to use and the pattern is recognizable to anyone who has seen a sunflower. I created the pattern using 1,825 circles—one for each day of the five-year plan and coincidentally one circle to represent every member of the Pitzer community. Each circle is a vessel to be filled and can be used to mark each day of the strategic vision. The Golden Ratio and thus the Fibonacci sequence, is present in every part of this project. It is used in the grid system for the poster and bookmark along with the typographic scale (inspired by Corbusier’s Modulor system which I learned about through Robert Bringhurt’s *The Elements of Typographic Style*). ## Unveiling to the Community What started as two ideas became, in practice, one system carried all the way through. The circle that stood for inclusivity didn't stay a single image, it became the logic underneath the grid, the type, and the rhythm of the whole piece. Forward momentum would have given the college a direction. Expansion gave it a structure: something that could hold 1,825 days, or thousands of people, in the same gesture. When the visual identity was unveiled to the Pitzer community, it wasn't presented as decoration for a strategic plan—it *was* the plan, translated into a form the community could stand in front of and see themselves inside of. It was an idea they were all familiar with, used to give shape to something that is perhaps abstract. That's what the word association work was for. Not to find a clever image, but to find the one idea already present in the goals themselves, then follow it far enough that it could carry real institutional weight.