GREENWOOD...Green wood...a tree....what else?

Greenwood has almost always been represented by a tree. Long ago, before the settlers to this area shooed out (or worse) all the Native Americans, built their cabins, churches and farms, the area was covered by a rather dense forest. A lot of it was cleared for farming, but some of those old trees still remain on various properties. Trees are fairly plentiful in certain areas of town, and if you get up early enough and take a stroll, (before the morning rush hour), you'd swear you woke up in a quiet forest filled with crisp fresh air. Air that has been cleared out overnight by the "green" part of Greenwood.

GREENWOOD TODAY

Nowadays, most people know Greenwood, Indiana as the place with the a huge shopping mall. It's been there since the 1960s, (in one form or another), and come the shopping holiday season, it is so packed with automobiles that some people often park on the outlying grass. "The Mall" is the place we hung out at as teenagers, and the place that I rarely go to as an adult. As a matter of fact, I never even had a job in the mall, which might make me a rare native of Greenwood.

I moved back to Greenwood (2004) after living in larger, more metropolitan towns like Denver, Indianapolis and Chicago. Since I left in 1991, a lot of things changed. I'm happy to see that Greenwood has become more ethnically diverse, which includes quite a few more restaurants of international cuisines. A rather large industrial area has sprung up along the highway, which probably provides quite a few jobs in logistics and warehousing. There's a huge amount of urban sprawl where areas that were once family farms have been taken over by housing developments. Old Town (where I live) has seen a bit of a boost in redevelopment. Besides all the churches, tattoo and beauty parlors, we now have a few nice restaurants and other businesses. People even seem to be interested in rehabbing their own homes. It has been exciting to see the city investing more in the parks and sprucing up public spaces. I'm particularly happy to see healthier grocery stores, better roads and a broader choice of locally owned craft breweries, but it still isn't enough.

Greenwood still needs a better image. We need to break free from being the town with "The Greenwood Park Mall" and be a town with the awesome people, great schools, beautiful parks, safe places to ride bicycles, walk or run, fantastic small businesses, wonderful food, and some darn tasty craft brews. Greenwood should not only be a great place to live, but a great place to work and play. Greenwood seriously needs to re-brand!

PROPOSED RE-BRANDING

With all these fantastic things going on, I don't see where the city has ever revamped (or even considered) its "brand". The brand of Greenwood, Indiana, just seems like an afterthought. (It could very well be that there is already something in the works, but I'm not aware of it. There doesn't seem to be a modern marketing strategy or effort to integrate social media. (Just try and Google to find the city's official twitter feed. If you do find it, you'll see that the City of Greenwood, has about 13 twitter followers when it should have tens of thousands.) To keep in line with the city's slogan "City of Pride and Progress", I'd like to see more progress and a wonderful showing of pride.

It's hard to find Greenwood's logo online. The image I found (above) was on an insurance website for the city's employees, and it isn't readily available in any type of good, large format file. The logo seems to just be used as some sort of government seal and that's about it. It is primarily seen on city stuff, like trucks, employee shirts and the sides of the city building. That's fine, leave it there, but also develop a design that is marketable and desirous. Develop something that citizens (who do have "pride" in their city) want to purchase and share with the world. Develop something that can turn a bit of revenue for the city....Why not develop a beautiful city flag?

FLAG DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

Taking the tree and the circle elements from the city logo, I started working independently on a flag project. The first design that I came up with was this: