For a loop
Work by Landor and Allgood, plus the latest logos added to LogoArchive
For a loop
Opinion by Emily Gosling
The official blurb that surrounds Chicago’s West Loop area is that it’s the city’s ‘hottest neighbourhood… a foodie mecca’, according to Choose Chicago, a ‘cultural powerhouse’, in the words of Landor, which recently created its new brand identity.
Having never been to West Loop, or even Chicago, it’s hard to get a grasp of what this all really means. Such enthused descriptors often require a bit of reading between the lines. It makes me think about Leyton in east London, where I live – a place often optimistically described as ‘up and coming’ (which in fairness, a few tiny pockets – namely a small stretch of road near the overground and the nerve centre of priced-out-of-Walthamstow-yummy-mummydom, Francis Road – are); but which for the most part is still a place where it’s depressingly unsurprising when someone sets fire to your front door.
So to discover the real West Loop, I looked to the trustiest of research tools: Reddit. The consensus seems to be that it’s a pricey-ish part of town that attracts a lot of restaurants since the milieu is generally ‘corporate’. As one Redditor writes, ‘the West Loop gives people that trendy hype feel weather [sic] they’re temp residents till they have kids, big time earners, your clients from out of town, or some suburbanites trying to live it up. It’ll probably calm down one day and there will be a new hip neighbourhood’. So in short, a classic case of gentrification; but one that seems largely inoffensive and foodie-focused.
This all chimes with what Landor says: ‘West Loop’s identity is changing, fast. And everyone sees it a little differently.’ Therefore – as is probably the case with pretty much all place brands – it’s almost impossible to create something that pleases all the people, all the time.
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