Today I’m sharing a recent logo project I completed for the City of Starkville Department of Environmental Services. I’m posting it because it was a fun public project and because I think it’s a good design solution. But, I’m also sharing it because Starkville, MS is doing something special, and I always enjoy applying good design to good ideas.

The project began as a logo for the city’s Curbside Recycling program. Several years ago, Starkville began a free program of picking up recycling at the curbside with no sorting required by citizens. That’s a pretty common service, but in our area, the fact that it was free to citizens was pretty groundbreaking. We were one of the first communities in the state to offer it as a free service.

In our initial meetings on the project, however, the tone of the conversation began to expand beyond just recycling to the concept of environmental services as a whole. In addition to recycling, the department handles sanitation, as you might imagine, but also rubbish & debris, a landfill (like most communities), and city landscaping. The committee members shared their thoughts on the ways sanitation and recycling are tied together and their goals of creating a community where the days for recycling pick-up actually outnumber the days for garbage pick-up. We recognized together that the underlying goals were really bigger than just recycling. The work of the department is really about creating a positive environment in the community, and about doing that responsibly with greater citizen involvement and buy-in.

We changed the program of the project to create a logo and brand image for the Department of Environmental Services as a whole, so that all the elements of creating this “clean community” are represented by the same image. With the visuals, we wanted the logo to be about more than trash — just as the department is. And, we wanted the brand to reflect that Starkville is growing something positive with our environmental services — in both mindset and the physical environment.

Enjoy this first look at the solution the City of Starkville embraced!