Neighborly design intern gives CHS new look

We've played this park image on our old CHS banner for all it's worth. Wesa's pretty pic of Volunteer Park served us well.

In early October, we planned a contest to replace the park image CHS banner. And we quickly canceled it after being, um, educated that contests are not the best way to achieve good design. Better, the comment masses said, was to hire an honest-to-goodness designer and set her to work designing her little heart out.

We were skeptical. The typical design budget for the typical neighborhood blog is approximately $0.35. We're not your typical neighborhood blog so we were able to up that a bit. But, really, it was out of the goodness of her heart helped by her knowledge that pumping out a super-hot CHS banner design would make her famous that we were able to hire our first ever CHS Design Intern -- EmilyP!

One morning meeting at Fuel Coffee and a few e-mails later, EmilyP submitted five proposals. Here is the CHS feedback she received at the time so that you can a) enjoy our version of the creative process and b) see what kind of hardships EmilyP put up with:

Birds: I like this. I've seen the bird on wire imagery a lot, though, so kind of think if we go this way, we need it to be more unique Capitol Hill (shoes on wire too?) or more clearly ravens??? Dunno. But it looks cool.
Bus wires: This is right on if you can get look and feel to be a little more gritty but I really like the cable idea. Probably my favorite concept.
Shoes: Good idea but I feel it's too individual -- as if those are the blogger's shoes perhaps when really the site is about everybody.
7 hills: I've been told the 7 hills thing was marketing BS made up back in the old days and there weren't really 7 hills :)
Graffiti: This if fun but given the ambiguities around tagging (and some of the non ambiguous stuff like anybody who tags a mural is a dipshit), I'd rather not.

26 e-mails later as we wrestled with the challenging and busy space at the top of every page of the site, Emily had achieved the CHS vision:

It works with our busy design. It's iconic. It has some fun surprises. And it was the product of collaborating with a neighbor. It's perfect. Thanks EmilyP!