A Crown Jewel of Culture
Pound-for-pound no city hits quite like New Orleans. This comes as no surprise, the region passed hands between empires multiple times in the first century of its existence. Chosen for its strategic necessity on the fringe of the French Empire, the region was a backwater destination for the demimonde from the onset. While it's difficult to envision now, New Orleans wasn’t always known for jazz or Mardi Gras, rather carrying different reputations at various points of its history. Those eras fused into something so checkered, unusual, and contrasting that it is considered America’s most faceted jewel today.
Ode to the Underbelly
The task of developing a City Edition story for a region so eclectic became a challenge of culling possibilities more than anything else. Eventually three distinct concepts were presented to the team, and the New Orleans “underbelly” (as we called it internally) was selected. Still, this theme alone presented a wide breadth of possibilities; everything from vampires and werewolves to pirates and zombies make up the folklore of the region.
Visual Themes
To further narrow the variety exploration was done on several themes within the Underbelly concept. While swamp monsters, werewolves, vampires and the undead were relevantly considered, they felt too specific or shallow to tell as NOLA stories, and too generic in execution. But the exploration demonstrated an underlying motif in the macabre. With that in mind we opted for a visual theme that could speak to all the themes simultaneously.
A Beaten Path
The modern French Quarter features all the tropes expected of the New Orleans underbelly; voodoo shops, haunted tour flyers, macabre art, and souvenir shops full of bizarre chachkis. Leaning too far into tropes quickly became a kitschy exercise, but not leaning into familiar styles enough risked being extraneous.
The Skelican
The eventual solution for the visuals resulted in a skeletonized Pelican (the Skelican), and a typeface that deconstructed the fluid form of art-nouveau type with angular lines to give an impression of staccatic movement.
