Most of my work this year went into an argument about two small words. City of.
They were on everything. The City of Edmonton, at the top of the letterhead, on the signs, in front of every public thing we said. It is accurate. But the longer I sat with it, the more it read like a small apology, the language of an administration explaining itself rather than the language of a place with a name.
So I spent the time putting the case together. The cities I admire don't do it. Toronto doesn't introduce itself as the City of Toronto. Neither does Vancouver, or New York, or San Francisco, or Chicago. They just say their name and let it stand.
Edmonton is the capital of this province. I came to feel we didn't need the preamble either. We are Edmonton.
Putting that in front of the mayor and council was one of the rooms I'll remember for a long time. You aren't really presenting a logo in a meeting like that. You're asking a place to carry itself a little differently, in public, for a long time. The design is almost the easy part. The argument is the work, and I was nervous going in.
It's the same thing I keep coming back to on other projects, whatever their size. Say the true thing. Take out the hedge. A lot of what reads as confidence in a piece of work is really just what you were willing to leave off.