Greater Iowa City, Inc.
And two organizations became one.
In 2023, the Iowa City Area Business Partnership (formerly the Chamber of Commerce) and the Iowa City Area Development Group merged into a single organization, serving all of Johnson County, Iowa. Benson & Hepker Design created the organization's branding, starting with helping the organization discover its new name. The main concept of the brand is a single line that creates shapes, letters, and cityscapes, in the way that the new single organization creates and connects two former organizations and their work.
Spreading the word.
In addition to a logo and identity system, branding includes custom initiative icons and icons for each town in Johnson County. Banners, presentations, printed collateral, online graphics, campaigns, and reports are a few of the projects Benson & Hepker has worked on with the Greater IC team.
Of course there's swag!
For its first merch drop, Greater IC wanted something that would emphasize its role as a county-wide organization. Using brand typefaces, Benson & Hepker designed a graphic that included the name of every community in the county and first appeared on these notebooks.
The state of the county.
One of Greater Iowa City, Inc.'s goals for 2024 was to discover the county's baseline in areas like workforce, income, and education, to help inform the direction of future initiatives. After spending months gathering and analyzing data, Greater IC introduced the 2024 data digest at its annual meeting in November. Designed by Benson & Hepker and intended primarily as an online publication, the printed copies of the digest were so popular at the annual meeting that there were none left by the end of the night.
