By: Stephanie Reynolds
Hello my AMAZINGLY FABULOUS Athens-Limestonians! It makes me smile to reach out to you like this. I hope your day is going swimmingly!
I have been doing a fun project lately: working on our new Visitor’s Guide. Now, I am not AT ALL a graphic artist. As you can tell by my photo, “visual” isn’t my strong suit. But a while back I decided to mockup a Visitor Guide in Canva so I can figure out where to place my blurbs.
Thankfully Canva is built for folks like me and has a ton of templates. A few (thousand) clicks of the mouse and voila! A brochure that almost looks like a professional visitor guide (if you hold it at arm’s length and squint a bit).
The fun part about this guide is that I got to use our new brand colors everywhere on it–aqua, teal, orange, green, and grey, with a little dark blue and yellow thrown in for “pop.”
Now, our old Visitor Guide was great, don’t get me wrong. It was glossy and filled with lots of useful information, obviously a work of labor and love for whomever designed it. But many years have passed and Tourism has taken on a new life, a new brand, a new identity.
As we switch out old for new merch and business cards and email headers and websites, I find the old Tourism guides and merch and graphics make me feel a little weighed down. Oh, not because there is anything wrong with them! But because we are new. Looking at the old designs is a little bit like a new butterfly remembering what it was like to be a caterpillar. A caterpillar is an amazing creature, but not the end goal, and sometimes you have just a little bit of uneasiness because the scent of earth, though good and fruitful, is still fresh in your nose (Wait. Do caterpillars even have noses? Ah well, you get my metaphor.)
I wonder, in my “Steph needs a hobby besides thinking about thinking” way, why it seems so necessary to let go of the old to grasp the new. I think we know, deep down, that changing oneself is like swinging from one ring to another—if you stay in the old ring, okay. If you swing to the new ring, you go farther. But if you hold onto both rings at the same time, you are pulled in two different directions and have no movement at all, not in progress or comfort. Just stuck.
I think that is why we get “break-up haircuts” and immediately donate our old suits when we retire. Deep down we know we need a visual cue to deeper change. We aren’t just turning a page, we are starting a new book.
In fact, that is standard wisdom: To be more successful at, say, changing your diet, you should rearrange your house furniture. It seems unrelated, but the change in how your house flows signals your brain that you are in a completely new pattern. Your brain, better at grasping a whole paradigm shift than saying no to double-stuffed Oreos while sitting in the same corner of the same living room watching the same TV programs, will say “Oh, that’s right. Oreos were for when we used to sit on the overstuffed chair and binge old 90’s sitcoms. Now we sit on the comfy couch and eat berries with real whipped cream and binge old 2000’s law dramas.” When you change big visual cues, your brain adapts more easily. You actually will do better on a tough important change, if you also change a bunch of other stuff at the same time.
This makes sense to me as I dig through closets and drawers and boxes of Tourism of years past. I am reminded of how far we have come. Every week, month, year we add new events. We make new friends. We are known by new people. We are something different. I rearranged the office, and every time I move something, I feel more refreshed.
So my amazing neighbors, do you have anything you are trying to change? Any budding little wings you are trying to grow? Is the scent of ground still a little pungent? What other changes might you try to help you shake off the past and live in the present?
By: Stephanie Reynolds, Athens-Limestone Tourism Association
