Logo for New Urbanist Economic Consulting Firm

Urban Community Economics (UCE)

We are starting a consulting company to provide economic, market, and fiscal information to communities and builders/developers. Examples of the kind of work we do are real estate market studies that examine what kinds of housing, retail or office development are feasible. Financing plans for the infrastructure needed for new development, and economic impact studies of the effects of development on the economy of communities and the budgets of municipalities. Our key expertise is the economics of land use and of transit.

We want to focus on the area of our practice we enjoy the most, the transit oriented urban projects in cities across the country and overseas. We want to help those projects come to fruition by helping to ensure they are financially and fiscally feasible. To assist in that effort we want to create a strong brand identity and we believe that a logo is key to that effort.

The target audience for our company will be developers, builders, municipalities, and other professional firms (especially planners and architects). The particular part of that audience we want to appeal to is those who focus on transit-oriented development and what's called "TND" (traditional neighborhood development) or "new urbanist". We think what will appeal to that audience is something that doesn't look TOO modern and has a bit of a retro feel to it (as suggested by the TND term). But we think conveying who we are is more important than tailoring the logo to a particular audience.

We are looking for a logo that tells a bit about what we do and who we are. What we do is economic and financial consulting and who were are is people committed to sustainable communities. Sustainable in our profession means communities with a full range of household incomes, transit options, and services. To that end the logo should convey the notion of promoting density and transit, perhaps.

We think the logo should be simple and pretty graphic (not a lot of text, and not necessarily our name or acronym). The logo will be featured on our webpage, on our business cards, and on our stationery. To that end one version or several versions of the logo would be fine.

Here's are examples of logos we like: http://www.strategiceconomics.com
http://www.urbancommunitypartners.com/

And here are ones we're not too fond of: http://www.epsys.com/
http://www.theconcordgroup.com/
http://www.bae1.com/

This one's not too bad: http://www.keysermarston.com

We have another idea now that we've gotten some entries. Mondrian in his painting Broadway Boogie Woogie depicted a sense of urbanism as he saw it in new york. Is it possible to incorporate that with the sense in some of the ideas of measurement, such as the horizontal and vertical arrows or lines? That would put Mondrian's grid on a graph or axes. Might work, we'd be interested to see it.