Branding New York without the clichés
The City of New York
Lead Designer (solo)
Brand development, Web design, Product design
Overview
The NYC Field Guide is a 13-episode series hosted by Micaela Birmingham. A show built around unique tips, hacks, and expert knowledge for how to actually live, work, and play across all five boroughs. Not the obvious tourist stuff. Real tips. The kind of knowledge you only get from actually living there.
My scope covered brand development, logo design, look and feel, social assets, and art direction that informed the set design. I owned the project fully as a solo designer which means I had full autonomy... no pressure?
Oh, and it won five Emmys. I'm still not fully over that.
A City Too Big for One Idea
I grew up in New York. The city doesn't have a single personality. That's the whole point. It's loud and quiet. Gritty and gorgeous. Historic and always reinventing itself.
When you're building a brand for something called the NYC Survival Guide, the temptation is to lean into the obvious: subway maps, yellow cabs, the Statue of Liberty. Been there, seen the T-shirt, never bought it. The challenge was finding something that felt like New York without feeling like a souvenir shop version of it. The show needed a visual identity that matched the actual energy of the city: confident, layered, iconic.
Color: Ignoring the Obvious
Here's the thing about designing for New York City: the subway color system is right there. Iconic, legible, immediately readable as "NYC."
I didn't use it. Not because it's wrong (it's great) but because it felt like a shortcut. The show was about thriving in New York, not just navigating it. I wanted colors that felt like the city from the ground up. Storefronts. Street vendors. Deli signs. The visual chaos you absorb just walking down any block. The palette we landed on pulls from all of that. Each color is a nod to the cultural richness of the city without reducing it to a transit map.
I was tempted. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't tempted.
The Logo
I developed four concepts. Each one explored a different interpretation of the brand's personality.
The options ranged from structured and bold. Stacked lockups with strong typographic hierarchy to something more dynamic with letterforms that moved and overlapped. The colorful concept pushed hardest into vibrancy, letting the "NYC" itself become a visual statement. Another leaned into a handmade, editorial quality that felt like a well-worn field guide pulled from someone's back pocket.
Testing across backgrounds was critical. Black. White. The signature yellow. The logo needed to work everywhere: web, social, broadcast, physical set. Each option had to hold up under all of it.
Embracing the Skyline
The client initially chose a direction inspired by vintage subway signs. The goal was to create a modern homage that captured the boldness of NYC… it didn't land. Close, but not quite.
I switched to using the skyline as inspiration. The final logo captured the grandness of a NYC building and the unique nature of its architecture. Iconic without being obvious.
From Screen to Set
One of the best parts? Watching the brand extend beyond the screen.
I designed screens and pillars that lived on set. The look and feel we established, the typography, the color system, the bold graphic attitude, fed directly into the physical environment. The set designer took what I'd built and made it real.
That kind of continuity doesn't always happen. When it does, it means the work actually… worked. The visual identity became the world the show lives in, not just a logo slapped on a lower third somewhereabouts.
That kind of continuity doesn't always happen. When it does, it means the work actually… worked.
Social Assets
A show lives on social now as much as it lives on screen. The assets had to work in a completely different context: smaller, faster, competing with everything else in a feed.
The assets also had to be templated, so I built a system that maintained the brand's energy without being rigid. The logo adapted. The color palette gave us flexibility. Typography did the heavy lifting when needed.
The goal was always recognition: you should be able to tell it's the NYC Field Guide before you read a word.
Results
The NYC Field Guide launched successfully across its 13-episode run. The brand held together across broadcast, social, and physical production. The visual identity gave the show a distinct presence in a crowded media landscape.
And then it won five Emmys: Best Lighting, Best Business Content, Best Editor, Best Promo, and Best Host/Moderator.
I found out on LinkedIn.
I think about that more than I probably should. Building something solo, a direction deck, some logo concepts, a color palette, and watching it win five awards? That's the whole job.
New York is a hard city to capture. I think we got close.
