Branding Chattanooga: Creating a Font to Tell Your Story

How does a city successfully build a name for itself and make a lasting impact on the public's perceptions?

Successful branding can turn a city into a place where people want to live, work and visit. A strong identity is vital if you are vying with other places for attention in tourism and business or relaunching an area after a regeneration initiative.

The re-branding efforts of one Tennessee city, Chattanooga, have been receiving some press recently. Two Chattanooga-based professionals, D.J. Trischler, a brand consultant and typeface designer Jeremy Dooley, have embarked on an ambitious project to distill the city's artistic and entrepreneurial spirit into a font called Chatype. The goal is to help the city and its businesses forge a distinct and cohesive identity through custom typeface, sending a visual message to the world that Chattanooga—a rapidly growing city in the midst of a creative renaissance—is “more than just your average Southern town.”

They pulled from a diverse set of local visual references including the Cherokee writing system, Coca-Cola's first bottling plant, and, of course, that city's "choo choo," immortalized by the 1940s big band song. Dooley calls the final style a "geometric slab serif." The "slabs are inspired by the industrial past. The geometric aspect is to add a sense of futurism," playing to the city's aspirations of becoming the "Silicon Valley of the East Coast" with an economy fueled by technology and startups.

While the designers still have more work to do to finalize the typeface, if all goes according to plan Chattanoogans will soon begin to see Chatype popping up on signage, business cards, emails, and websites published by the city government. The new font helps give the city an updated image, one that better tells the story of their environmental, economic, and artistic growth over the past few decades.

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