Third Friday Durham Brand Refresh
While we wrapped up the new Downtown Durham Inc. branding, the team asked us to refresh the brand of one of their biggest cultural vibrancy initiatives, Third Friday Durham.
If you’re unfamiliar, Third Friday is an art walk, gallery crawl, and culture celebration held (you guessed it!) on the third Friday of every month. We needed to bring a touch of DDI’s new styles into the Third Friday brand—and update collateral fonts for improved readability.
Refining Type
Our first stop was taking a close look at the logotype. DDI wanted to hang onto years of brand equity by sticking to the same typeface. So, we set out to correct scalability and hierarchy issues by using different weights. In the original version, “Third” and “Durham” stood out the most due to their bold weight and the narrowness of “Friday.” We rebalanced the hierarchy to shift focus to “Third Friday,” as a unit—with less emphasis on “Durham” since it’s a given in context of the event landscape. We also refined alignment in the lettering to help the type stack feel more unified and clean. The end result was a more scalable, more sophisticated version of their existing brand.
The Third Friday logo, before and after.
Collateral Type
The logotype features a font called Acme, which works well for logos and short text like headlines. However, Third Friday’s paragraph copy needed a lighter touch. We selected Barlow as the replacement. It’s intentionally less quirky for a smoother reading experience, but narrow like Acme for parity.
A page from the Third Friday brand guide illustrating collateral type usage.
Reimagining Color
Third Friday had traditionally relied on seasonal color pairings. However, with many hands on deck between DDI and their vendors, that approach became cumbersome. So, we leaned on the research and work we did for DDI’s color palette to guide the way for Third Friday’s.
One of Third Friday’s most consistently used colors was a lime green, which leaned slightly toward the pea-green side. We replaced it with a vibrant, saturated lime from the new DDI palette and paired it with DDI’s elegant, dark navy for Third Friday’s new primary colors. This combination ensures a lot of contrast in designs, which makes for better readability overall. We also included a robust set of secondary colors from DDI’s palette to bring some variety to their future designs.
A page from the Third Friday brand guide featuring color codes.
Putting it to the Test
With all the refinements done, we exported a quick ship brand guide to help DDI’s team stay on-brand as they launched the new styles. A brand guide—even one that covers the essentials—is the best way to make sure your team, partners, volunteers, and vendors use the correct colors and fonts.
We moved quickly from brand kit to crucible pieces, immediately putting Third Friday’s new styles to the test. Check out some of the crucible pieces below.
And, if you live in or near Durham, be sure to check out the next Third Friday event.
