Elizabeth City: Brand Evolution Project Spotlight

Elizabeth City is a charming, waterfront destination on the Albemarle Sound in northeast North Carolina. With a new Executive Director leading the tourism marketing team and an energized group of local businesses and partners ready to drive visitation and economic growth for the area, the destination was ready for a fresh, new look to lead their tourism marketing.

After being selected as Visit Elizabeth City’s agency of record following a competitive RFP process, designing an updated, modern visual brand became a primary focus for our agency. Known as “The Harbor of Hospitality,” Elizabeth City has an extremely picturesque waterfront that is the centerpiece of the downtown area and one of the destination’s leading tourism amenities. Keeping that element as the foundation for the new visual brand, our creative team evolved the existing brand to a cleaner, more modern representation of the destination. The new brand’s design hierarchy places the destination name at the forefront through the use of a larger, sans-serif font style, infusing the blue and teal hues present in the previous brand, as well as using orange as an accent color. We then used a script treatment for the word ‘Visit” and reimagined the boat and water imagery as lighter line art illustrations, no longer competing with the destination’s name.

With this new, engaging brand, the Visit Elizabeth City team and its partners are positioned to propel their marketing and attract increased visitation, bringing continued economic success to this beautiful city.