Award-Winning Logo Design for City Government Project

The City of Tulsa, Oklahoma was founded at the turn of the twentieth century. Originally settled between 1828 and 1836 by the Lochapoka Band of the Creek Native American tribe, it quickly became one of the most important oil hubs in the United States when the ‘black gold’ was discovered nearby.

In 2008, the city decided to design a program that would increase efficiency and streamline existing processes, known as HPG, which stood for High Performance Government. This program required a high-quality, custom logo design that would represent the history and core values of the City of Tulsa. The resulting design was the recipient of the 2010 Communicator Awards’ Silver Award of Distinction in the Logo Design Category.

Our creative team produced an effortlessly refined logo design that incorporated the heritage and history of the city of Tulsa seamlessly with an air of progress and improvement. The understatement of the image within the design, acting as more of an accent to the text than a distracting image. The colors of the image were based on the official colors of the city of Tulsa, while the shape recalled the rich heritage of the state of Oklahoma.

As an organization based within the operation of a city, the HPG program aimed to make necessary evaluations and decisions based around the greater good of the City of Tulsa. Their mission was to assess the existing processes and operations, noting which appear to be outdated or in the process of aging out. Certain means and methods became obsolete at the introduction of the modern internet to society, resulting in loss of effectiveness and wasted resources.

The central goal of the HPG was to identify and improve areas within the City of Tulsa that were ineffective or inefficient. These could be interior organizations, positions, or even something as small as a filing system. Updating and streamlining these processes would ultimately improve the operational process and reduce unnecessary cost and time waste. In order for the public to understand and recognize the efforts of the program, they knew they needed a superior identity design rooted solidly within the narrative of the City of Tulsa.

Our creative team understood the importance of incorporating themes of the City of Tulsa within the design. These elements act as multifaceted symbols of the colors, images, and heritage affiliated with Tulsa and Oklahoma as a whole. The design was created to appear simple and effortless, while also conveying a number of important themes.

The text of the design was broken into two parts, the acronym ‘HPG’ and the full name of the program, ‘High Performance Government’. The acronym was situated above the full name, formatted in a thin, serif font and solid black on a white background. This color choice is reflective of the colors of Tulsa and also allows for versatility in display material and color choice, as the colors can be reversed to appear on a dark background.

The full name of the program was situated below the acronym as an underline. This text was formatted in a thin, sans serif font and a royal blue that matches other elements of the design. The text has also been italicized in order to create movement across the design and subtly add design elements.

The image of the design was a colored star, placed in the position of a superscript on the acronym. This star is representative of the Native American heritage of the City of Tulsa, as well as an important element of the official seal of the city. The outline and four lower points of the star were black, tying in with the main color of the text.

Beginning at the top of the star and continuing into the center, we added a colored shape representative of an upward-pointing arrow. This arrow represented the elevation and improvement initiated by the program, as well as highlighted the institution of a more streamlined and efficient operation. The left side of the shape was the same royal blue as the full name of the program, with a black line down the center. The right side was a bright yellowish-gold, which along with the royal blue color, represent the official colors of the City of Tulsa.