Franklin Matters: Economic Development Committee reviews and approves revisions to branding proposal (video)

Thursday, December 12, 2024

Economic Development Committee reviews and approves revisions to branding proposal (video)

The Economic Development subcommittee met as scheduled on Wednesday, Dec 11. All 4 members were present in Chambers for this session.

Franklin TV video available for replay -> https://www.youtube.com/live/B7xXNIA2ULo?si=elUr9XSRh6M8Whwu&t=27

Agenda doc -> https://www.franklinma.gov/sites/g/files/vyhlif10036/f/agendas/2024-12-11_edc_agenda.pdf

Quick recap:

There were 2 votes each to rescind their prior approval of the (1) brand proposal and (2) seal proposal and recommend the revisions as presented during the session. Both votes were 4-0 by the subcommittee. The proposals are now targeted for the Town Council agenda for Dec 18 meeting.

The memo recap of the work leading to the revisions to be presented during the session:

"As you may recall, at the last EDC meeting on November 20, 2024, the Committee voted 3-1 to recommend the logo from the second round of revisions, by designer and Franklin resident, AJ Rebecchi, to the Town Council at their December 18, 2024 meeting. The EDC also voted unanimously to use the lowercase “f” (entitled Responsiveness Option B in the presentation) and Option C-2 of a revised Town Seal.

At the meeting one member raised questions and expressed confusion concerning the revised logo and later spoke with the Administration to clarify their questions and concerns. In an eﬀort to ensure the Committee feels heard, the Administration worked with the designer on an additional round of designs to address the concerns raised and bring forth design changes accommodating these concerns.

At the next meeting we will have the designer provide an updated design and ask the Committee to consider new updates to the design for recommendation to the Town Council. We would also like to revisit the Town Seal discussion, as we have concerns with making signiﬁcant changes to the seal, as such changes will trigger a lengthy process evolving the state to change the oﬃcial town seal. With that, we recommend the Committee consider just digitally cleaning up the seal, as the project originally proposed, but keeping the historic seal of record.

As a reminder, this project was part of the Town Council goals and was started several years ago and picked back up last spring. Over the last four months we have had several rounds of meetings with the designer and opportunities for public comment and feedback, including a townwide survey. Once the logo is ﬁnalized, the designer can work with the Administration on the various departmental lockups, brand guidelines, templates and training. Our hope is to incorporate this new logo into our website redesign to be launched on January 7, 2025.

The Town Branding Project is being funded through a state economic development earmark enacted by Governor Baker in November of 2022 and cannot be used for other municipal purposes."