All America City

For the past month, every free moment of my life seems to have been absorbed by preparations for the National Civic League’s “All America City”:http://nclweb.org/aac/ competition.

It’s amazing how things work out. As I “mentioned”:http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/life/give_me_a_s_give_me_a_t_give_me_a_a_give_me_a_m.php last month, Stamford made the finals of the competition highlighting 3 community programs in its applications, one of which was the Parent Leadership Training Institute. I’m on the Board of PLTI, so I attended an early planning meeting. One thing led to another, and not only am I leaving for Atlanta this Wednesday along with about 50 of my fellow Stamford delegates (the competition is June 10-12) but I worked on the “branding” of Stamford for the competition. We’re going to have t-shirts, hats, bags, pens and lots of “stuff” to wear and give away…all printed with variations of this image that I designed (“The City That Works” is Stamford’s motto):

I spent hours this morning with a team of folks getting everything packed up to ship down to Atlanta and if I do say so myself, it looks really good. The t-shirts have the above logo which represent the top 7 languages spoken in this city. It was important that our image reflect the diversity of our community. I’m told that there are over 50 languages spoken in our public schools. The other materials have just the ribbon with the motto. It’s simple, clear and prints beautifully. As a team, we’ve been working hard. We have a good presentation put together highlighting what makes our city great and I think we have a real shot at winning this thing.

I’ve been designing for a while and there’s still that thrill of seeing your work in its final form and being able to point to it and say “I did that.” It never gets old.

Wish us luck!