The Electric Art Project

We were commissioned by the College Town consortium to create designs representing each of Spartanburg South Carolina’s seven institutions of higher learning to be placed on utility boxes throughout the city center. As a part of College Town’s goal to bring more student voices to the quickly-developing downtown area, we gathered feedback from each of the schools’ undergraduate populations. Some of this feedback was collected in person, by us, and some was gathered remotely by student representatives at each of the universities. We piloted this project with a design for the overall College Town brand: a pattern composed of stylized icons, some focusing on the college experience in general and others that were designed to target specific institutions’ specialty areas of study. For continuity throughout all eight designs, we kept this overall format, and created a custom pattern of iconography for each institution based off of student feedback and what they felt made their school uniquely theirs. The results are a delightfully varied symbology from school to school: recognizable architecture, on-campus sculpture, plants and animals frequently seen on campus, imagery related to institution-specific rituals, particularly-favored food items, and discipline specific implements are just some of the imagery we compounded to create these works. Each pattern was executed in its corresponding school’s color palette to finalize the design. The works were then printed in vinyl and installed at various locations throughout Spartanburg’s burgeoning downtown.