The Enolia
Completed Date
2024
Industry
Apartment / Mixed-Use
Discipline
Brand Design
Enolia McMillan was a trailblazing educator and civil rights leader who spent most of her life in Baltimore working to make it better. Her career was marked by a number of incredible firsts including being the first African American administrator at a number of schools, the first woman to chair the Morgan State University Board of Regents, and the first female national president of the NAACP. To quote the late congressman Elijah Cummings, “she was a path-finder, a record-breaker, a pace-setter.”
Discovering her remarkable story during our naming process, with its deep connections to Baltimore and Morgan State, led to a very unique and meaningful branding direction for this project. The Enolia brings off-campus student apartments to the heart of Northeast Baltimore, not far from Morgan State University.
We created a custom script wordmark based on Enolia McMillan’s signature. Exploring a number of stylistic options, we landed on a mark that embodies two traits characteristic of our muse: timelessness and elegance.
When translated into signage, the logo’s classic aesthetic will bring a unique look to the building’s façade at 4529 Harford Road, while echoing back to the lettering styles of the early decades of McMillan’s long and storied career. Additionally, the graceful script emulates the elegance that Enolia epitomized throughout her life.
Enolia McMillan and Morgan State students alike have a long history of standing up for civil rights, particularly in the Baltimore area. Consequently, we were inspired by the typography of the Civil Rights movement when selecting brand typography. VTC Martin, a typeface created by Vocal Type Co., was modeled after the wood type headlines often found on newspapers and posters throughout the Civil Rights era. Such headlines can be found in Baltimore’s own Afro-American newspaper from that time. This historical connection, along with its unique style, makes it a perfect display typeface for the brand.
More to come…