Created as a competition entry. City of Everett was not a client and did not commission this work. Open logo design contest run by the City of Everett, Washington.
In the autumn of 2014 the City of Everett ran an open contest for a new civic logo. Anyone could enter, entrants signed an artist agreement assigning rights to the winning mark, and the city narrowed the field to a semifinal round before picking a winner. I entered, made the semifinal with two concepts, and finished 2nd.
Everett is a working city — a Boeing assembly plant, a naval station, a deep-water port on Port Gardner Bay, and the Cascades on the eastern horizon. The temptation with a brief like this is to put all of it on the mark. That was the thing to avoid. A city logo has to sit on a parks sign, a health inspection placard, a utility invoice, and a truck door, which rules out anything busy, anything that depends on color, and anything that only works large.
So I fixed the structure first and tested the imagery inside it. Every concept used the same skeleton: a silhouette on top, EVERETT in wide-tracked Garamond capitals underneath, and the founding date set small between two rules. Garamond because a civic mark should look like it has been there a while, and because its old-style figures make "est. 1893" read as a date rather than a number.
The variable was what sat above the wordmark. The first pass was a single gestural pen stroke of a mountain range — the most expressive version, and the weakest, because the thin stroke would have disappeared at sign scale. The second solidified the range into a filled silhouette with a cleaner peak profile. The third swapped the mountains for downtown, traced from a photograph taken at Everett Station: the mid-rise blocks, the brick hotel, and the cable-stayed masts at the transit center breaking the roofline, over a hand-drawn waterline standing in for the bay.
Both the mountain and skyline versions advanced, and the semifinal brief was a different job. A single mark was no longer the ask — the city wanted to see the identity working across departments. That turns a logo into a system, and it exposes weaknesses a standalone mark can hide. I built each direction out three ways: the primary lockup, a reversed treatment on solid black, and departmental variants for Parks & Recreation, the Health Department, and Inspectional Services, with the department name set in a condensed sans beneath the civic mark so the hierarchy stayed unambiguous.
The system work is what separated the two directions. The mountain silhouette survived reduction cleanly — three peaks, a clear profile, still legible at the size a departmental lockup forces it down to. The skyline did not fare as well. The detail that made it specific to Everett, particularly the transit center masts, started to fill in and mush at small sizes. It is the better illustration and the worse trademark.
I placed 2nd. The city went another direction, and in an open contest with a rights-assignment agreement that means the work goes back in the drawer. What it was worth was the semifinal round — being made to prove a mark across a department structure is a harder and more useful exercise than drawing a logo, and it is the part of this project I would still defend.
