These placards are used during our Blitz Event so artist and business owner teams can quickly communicate which expert’s assistance they need.

Update and Reflection
What a busy month! This past month artists, business owners and potential fabricators submitted their final design proposals as part of the CoSign Competition.  These proposals included feedback and input from historic preservationists, permitting folks, and engineering experts. The final design proposals were submitted to a jury of sign-makers and design experts, who selected the 10 submissions that will be fabricated through the CoSign Process.

Once the jury selects a design, a fabricator is assigned. Sign Fabricators make a shop drawings, which were then submitted to the CoSign architectural team. Our architects have been reviewing the designs to ensure that the sign will meet permitting and historic neighborhood requirements as well as determining the best way for the sign to hang safely. The next step will be receiving the actual permits from the City of Cincinnati. Our team has been doing a lot of pre-work to make this happen, and we are excited to have all 10 permits in our hands.

Recent Wins
This month, we have whittled down the design proposals to the 10 signs that will be fabricated. We are thrilled for the 10 new businesses along the Hamilton Ave corridor in the neighborhood of Northside. We believe that these 10 signs are well placed and, when combined with last year’s signs, create a critical mass of signage to drive economic development in the community.

CoSign is documenting the process and conducting interviews with businesses and artists participating in the initiative. As part of this, we have interviewed business owners that received a sign last year to paint a picture for us of the effectiveness of the project. Business Owners are reporting an increase in visibility and therefore customer traffic with the signs.

Insight/Provocation
To make this a seamless process, we rely heavily on a team of architects, engineers, historic preservationists, sign experts and fabricators and city permitting/code experts. As we look to replicate the CoSign project, it is apparent that we need this versatile and experienced team. It could be a challenge for other communities to re-create the team. Cincinnati is very lucky to have the Sign Museum locally so that we can leverage those relationships for the CoSign Project. We will need to explore how to support other communities that want to re-create the project but might not have access to these experts.