Introducing The City Collection

CommunityBusiness

Oct 2

I’ve always loved designing for cities. I first fell in love with the idea of boosting city pride through design in Peoria. When I began my business in 2016, few pieces existed that truly promoted pride in the city. I often felt surrounded by negative comments about what the city had to offer. The designs I created didn’t change the minds of all the negative people, but they did really resonate with those trying hard to make Peoria a wonderful place to live and work. I have loved watching those passionate about making a difference in the Peoria community embrace and share my work with others.

For the first three years of my business, I fully immersed myself in local and building up a strong collection of quality designs for Peoria. I felt there was so much potential and so much work to do. The products I created found successful homes in places like the Peoria Riverfront Museum, the Peoria Airport, and smaller locally owned shops - where they are still popular.

While living in Peoria, I failed to make time to expand my designs beyond the Peoria area. After moving to Chicago in June, I knew I wanted to replicate some of the projects that I most enjoyed in Peoria. I started by creating postcards, stickers, and magnets. And then created 100 Days of Chicago and began exploring opportunities to sell these designs locally. I even snuck in the development of four Milwaukee designs.

Seeing these new designs start to take shape and find new homes throughout the city made me start thinking bigger. Maybe there was more potential with this idea of focusing on cities? So the development of this new city collection began. I thought about cities that could use a little boost and cities that are well-known or favorites of mine. I put together twelve new designs (adding to the Chicago and Milwaukee ones), knowing that I just needed to start and not get caught up in selecting the next cities to focus on. I hope that this is just the beginning. There are still so many more cities that I’d like to explore and add to the collection.

The fourteen cities in this collection so far are St. Louis, Las Vegas, Peoria, Milwaukee, Bloomington-Normal, Seattle, Des Moines, Indianapolis, Chicago, Grand Rapids, Boston, Phoenix, Cleveland, and New York. The color of each design is inspired by some aspect of that city - their tourism and/or economic development efforts, city flag, or other frequently used colors.

I wanted to create a series that felt cohesive and has lots of room for growth. I’d love to expand each of these cities (and more) to have their own full lines of products. If you know anyone in this first round of cities, be sure to share their city’s design with them! I hope that through this collection, my designs can reach and impact a larger audience. I’d love to have wholesale products grow to make up a larger part of my business, while continuing to do the custom design work that I love.