About the Identity

Since 2014, when we first started applying elements of the host city to the Brand New Conference identity, we haven’t had a starting point served to us in a silver platter as shiny and clutter-free as this year: Earning the nickname “Steel City”, Pittsburgh’s legacy for shaping the steel industry in the United States during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century is well known, thoroughly documented, and popularly embraced so there was no doubt in our mind that anything we did had to revolve around steel. How exactly, though, was less straightforward but also not too much of a reach.

One of the first names that come to mind when talking about Pittsburgh and the steel industry is Carnegie, as in Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who led the expansion of the American steel industry and helped transform Pittsburgh into one of the biggest industrial powerhouses in the world at the time, through his eponymous Carnegie Steel Company, which also helped him become one of the wealthiest people in history and his philanthropic efforts remain with us today through well-known entities like Carnegie Hall in New York and Carnegie Mellon University and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh in his adopted hometown.

All of this to say that our very first Google search was “Pittsburgh Carnegie Steel”. Multiple clicks and pages later we landed on a 1927 edition of “Carnegie Beam Sections: Profiles, Properties and Safe Loads for New Series of Structural Steel Beams and Column Sections Manufactured by Carnegie Steel Company, Pittsburgh, PA”, which you can find a full reproduction of it here, an eBay edition here, and some samples of the pages that caught our attention below.

Aside from the charm of early twentieth-century typesetting and the crudely mechanical diagrams of the cross sections of the beams, it was in this publication that we found our visual hook to build the identity around because all we could see in these beams was a slab serif so we set out to find the coolest and most pronounced slab serif we could find but one that wasn’t too cartoony as we didn’t want ginormous slabs. (For a brief moment, for example, we considered Bureau Brut’s Troulers because look at the width of those slabs!) The winning choice turned out to be Order Type Foundry’s Stringer, a “bracketed slab-serif revived from Ionics of the early 20th century and adapted for modern day typesetting”.

Another nickname for Pittsburgh is “City of Bridges”, which is well earned given the 446 bridges of various sizes and designs that connect the city, including the postcard-worthy “Three Sisters” bridges (shown below) so we also felt like we needed to incorporate them. This wasn’t entirely difficult because — make way for Captain Obvious — bridges are made of steel so the leap from steel beams to steel bridges isn’t much of a stretch BUT there is also the diversity of silhouettes of the bridges seen from the side and we thought we could incorporate some of those curving, swooping gestures into the logo system somehow, especially given how popular graphic renderings of the bridges are in the world of ’burgh merch. (Exhibit A and Exhibit B shown further below but there is plenty more out there.)

So Stringer and bridges became the two elements we started playing with, which, as is usually the case with first drafts, proved promising but not yet exciting. In this initial exploration we began to play with the five weights of Stringer where each heavier weight was smaller in font size to try and yield the same optical weight across sizes to then try and stack them in different combinations and perhaps shape some bridges.

At the same time as we were doing early explorations we were having a conversation with a vendor about an idea we had for one of the physical applications and, without giving too much away, it was clear that whatever we ended up with was going to need to be able to be turned into a stencil easily so we started playing with that in the design exploration, which eventually led to the final approach we went with.

The Venn diagram of the two explorations above yielded an approach we were excited by but that needed some refinement given that we were somewhat crudely messing with Stringer and making do with the weights available. We also accepted the fact that no matter how much we tried, any typographic compositions we attempted to construct from “BNCONF”, “2025”, and “PGH” were never going to look like bridges so we shifted our mindset to the idea that with steel beams you can construct any kind of structure you want so we focused on creating compositions where the different font sizes could be locked into sturdy, structural compositions that perhaps, maybe, almost, potentially look like bridges but also like buildings or gazebos or anything else.

Once we had the idea locked in, it was time to bring in the experts so we reached out to Order so that they could help us finesse the five weights of Stringer and add a proper stencil for our hero set of characters: “BNCONF”, “2025”, and “PGH”. We also asked for a sixth weight — an ultra thin — so that we could have six sizes to play with. Working with Emily Klaebe, who designed Stringer, part of the challenge we gave Order was maintaining the stencil spacing equal across all sizes as well all of the stems having equal optical weight. No surprise, they delivered.

With a finalized set of glyphs we started playing with different compositions, some of which you can see here on the website, some that you will see on social media, and some yet to be made based on future physical applications so this is just our starter set.

While the obvious color palette would have been a bright yellow and a pitch-black black because everything in Pittsburgh is that color combination it didn’t quite feel right — trust us, we tried it — so we went with some yellow- and black-adjacent colors in the form of gold and a dark gray with a deep red as the accent. These were not just gratuitous choices as we do have a couple of relevant reasons for going in this direction. The main one being the venue.

We rarely let the venue inform our design decisions but when we tried to picture the conference materials having to live within the space we decided to blend into it instead of trying to stand out from it and, to be honest, the various red carpets and gold accents throughout the venue are quite yummy so we were more than happy to let the venue influence the identity. Instead of black we are using a dark gray to allude to steel because, again, without giving too much away, you can bet there will be actual steel involved in the physical pieces. To round out the color palette we are using a light tan color to echo both the off-white walls and columns of the venue as well as the aged paper from the “Carnegie Beam Sections” catalog, which also features a muted red and faded black (given its age), providing us with another conceptual hook to hang our color palette on.

For our typographic palette we could not resist asking Order Type Foundry to customize the Thin weight of Stringer with a stencil treatment and we guess they couldn’t resist doing it because here we are, with a lovely stencil slab serif ready to be cut out of the heaviest of metals or simply lay gently on top of color blocks and headshots in digital form. In supporting roles we have Pennsylvania Sans Condensed by Commercial Type and Thermochrome by Mass-Driver, both of which have some fun relevance to our host city and to steel.

As the name implies, Pennsylvania Sans has everything to do with Pennsylvania albeit one step removed. We’ll explain: In 2000, Commercial Type’s Christian Schwartz released Pennsylvania, a monospace semi-slab designed after the numerals and capital letters used in the state’s license plates for various decades before they changed to a more basic sans serif in 1999. Then, in 2024, Inga Plönnigs developed a sans family based on Schwartz’s design including a regular and a condensed width, which is the one we are using in its Black weight only, so while not a direct descendant of the license plate, the PA DNA is definitely there.

The choice of Thermochrome might come across as self-indulgent or irrelevant but that is far from the truth because as much as we do enjoy some self-indulgence from time to time we always try to make relevant choices and here is why Thermochrome fits the bill: In some cases, steel-based products end up having a serial number applied to them in some form or another. Most commonly, they are engraved in small type sizes but, as we learned, they can also be applied in very large sizes and at scale on steel beams. What these two applications have in common is the use of dot matrix typography that saves time and resources to reproduce but without sacrificing legibility. While at small sizes an etching process is used, the bigger sizes are kind of extra fun to apply, whether it’s through a custom machine like this or with a hand-held inkjet printer like this. On steel beams in particular, what happens is that the dots stretch into lines as the machine moves from side to side creating an effect that is perfectly captured (most likely unknowingly) by Thermochrome.

There you have it. All of the above and the website is as far as we’ve gotten at the moment but we already have a couple of cool ideas for physical applications and, as usual, we will continue developing the identity as different needs arise.