In early 2010, students at Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter were charged with devising a new brand for the entire city–a task all the more daunting given that Richmond, Virginia, has long had a strong, deeply embedded identity. This is the former seat of the Confederacy, the heart of Colonial America, the place where you go to learn about battlefields and founding fathers and early U.S. history. That sepia-toned legacy, though, in many ways sits at odds with the portrait of a cutting-edge community that Richmond’s innovation champions now want to project.

Venture Richmond, a downtown booster group, wanted something that would instead convey creativity, dynamism, and innovation. The city had quietly been transforming into a more creative place, a hub of eclectic interests from indie music to mountain biking to biotechnology. But hardly anyone outside of Richmond, it seemed, knew anything about this. And then it turned out that plenty of locals in Richmond weren’t convinced the city needed a new identity anyway. “There are some people, very significant leaders in the Richmond area, who felt like, ‘No it’s not about creativity, it’s about history,’” says Kelly O’Keefe, professor and former managing director of the Brandcenter, the university’s top-tier advertising school.

Check out the slideshow of RVA logos

His students eventually decided it was better to co-opt Richmond’s historic narrative rather than try to ignore it. They came up with what the Chamber of Commerce’s Chrystal Neal calls an “anti-campaign,” an idea so malleable and unobtrusively grassroots that it sounds as if it couldn’t possibly have been dictated by the mayor’s office. The campaign, “RVA Creates,” is built around a familiar acronym that serves as both a tech-forward hashtag and a blank canvas–one on which Civil War re-enactors and startup entrepreneurs alike are invited to project their own ideas about the city’s creativity. The Brandcenter created an online generator that allows anyone to upload into the “RVA” logo images from the local music scene, or the river-rafting community, or the downtown streetscape–or a nearby battlefield. Running throughout all of these scenes is the idea that creativity takes many forms and that, in fact, Richmond’s history has been defined by examples of it.

“In fact, every place in America is the same age, it isn’t about how old we are,” O’Keefe says. “History is about stuff that happens. And stuff that happens that we know of in history is generally either tragic or pretty darn innovative. We have our share of both in Richmond.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote America’s earliest statute for religious freedom here in 1786. That was a pretty innovative thing to do at the time. In 1903, Maggie Walker, a black woman, became the country’s first female bank president. She was an innovator. Richmond was also the first city in the South to have telephone service (1879) and the first in the nation to have an electric streetcar system (1888). Both of those were game-changing, creative innovations of their era. The RVA campaign has tried to weave all of these civic memories into the contemporary idea that creativity isn’t just for artists–that it is the building block on which successful “Creative Age” cities will take hold. In making this case, the campaign’s website and promotional videos have all taken care to first nod to the city’s history.