Expo ‘74 50th Celebration
If you’re from Spokane, you’ve heard of Expo ‘74. If you aren’t — or haven’t, it was Spokane’s time to shine on a global stage: The 1974 World’s Fair aka the “International Exposition on the Environment”. Spokane was the smallest city ever to host a World’s Fair and it was a big deal for our little city! In the time since, Spokane has done a lot of growing but the legacy of Expo still lives on.
Now, 50 years later, the city is hosting an anniversary celebration. We helped them revitalize the original visual identity, define brand pillars to create a refreshed visual system, and build engaging illustrations, posters, and billboards.
Scope
Branding | Illustration | Print Materials | Social Media
Content Production
Expo Legacy
This project presented a unique challenge, because we didn’t want to lose the retro charm of the original Expo brand, but we also needed to update it in order to make it usable in the modern age. Additionally, we made illustrations to represent each of the 5 pillars the Expo team chose to highlight.
Legacy Logo
The Expo ‘74 logo featured a stylized Möbius strip - a perpetual shape selected to represent the ongoing connectedness of life and the environment. Blue, green, and white in the logo symbolized key aspects of the fair's environmental theme: clean water, plants and trees, and fresh air.
Updated Logo
Staying true to the soul of the original Expo logo was of the highest importance to us when we attacked this project. We cleaned up the mobius, optimized the colors, and found a modern type system that would be both functional for the Expo team, and felt true to the original typography.
