St. Augustine · Avilés Centennial
A hundred years of sister city ties between the oldest city in the United States and the birthplace of its founder, turned into a registered trademark and two permanent markers installed on the street.
A hundred year old sister city relationship that almost nobody on the street knew existed.
St. Augustine, founded in 1565, is the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the United States. Avilés is the birthplace of Pedro Menéndez, its founder. The two cities had spent a century exchanging delegations, replicas and gifts, and that century lived in council minutes and in the memory of a few families. The brief could have been solved with a commemorative logo and a ceremony. The reformulation was to treat the centennial as interpretable heritage: if the relationship is the cultural asset, you have to be able to read it standing up, on the street, without entering any building, and in both cities languages.
Registered identity
Centennial mark with the Avilés coat of arms, a five flat colour system with two gradients, its own typeface and an application manual. Registered as a trademark.
Application
Street flags, apparel, tote and institutional merchandising for the commemorative year.
Centennial marker
Interpretive panel telling the story from 1924 to 2024, with the historic photograph of the delegation being received in Avilés and a timeline of seven milestones with their physical location in the city.
Mosaic marker
A second panel devoted to the Pedro Menéndez mosaic, thirty three Asturian ceramicists, assembled by the St. Augustine public works crew.
Bilingual by design
Each marker has an English and a Spanish version on the same grid, not as an added translation but as two pieces of equal rank.
Centennial marker, English version
Pedro Menéndez mosaic marker
Centennial mark and its applications