Emilyn Sheffield and Alan Rellaford
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Roads Less Traveled
Recreation and design students and professors work together to make their mark in the West
by marion harmon
Ask the typical Californian where the King Range National Conservation Area is on a map, and he or she will probably be hard-pressed to quickly locate it. Managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), this spectacular mountain range in southern Humboldt County that seems to thrust out of the Pacific Ocean is one of the many scenic areas in the state that is well worth visiting but not as well known as favorites like Yosemite National Park. But as California’s population and tourism increase, there has been a rising interest in visiting different areas of the state and therefore a rise in demand for information about these lesser-known spots.
This is where the work of Emilyn Sheffield, Alan Rellaford, and their students comes in. In the past seven years, they’ve been involved in a series of public land identity projects in California and all over the West, helping small communities put a public face on public lands. After establishing the Tourism and Communication Design Partnership, they created such visual aids as poster maps found at rest stops throughout California and signs in remote areas of the Southern California desert.
“People want more information about their public lands, and they’re looking for different types of information than they once sought,” says Sheffield, chair of the recreation and parks management department at CSU, Chico. “In addition to all the traditional outdoor recreation that we’ve always seen on public lands—the hiking, camping, fishing, and picnicking—we’re seeing increased interest in the cultural heritage that is tucked into the byways and back ways.”
The partnership is an interdisciplinary group of faculty, staff, and students whose projects, supported through the CSU, Chico Office of Sponsored Programs, increase the visibility of public lands at all levels—local, state, and federal. That, in turn, helps keep small rural communities economically vital as new dollars enter local economies via tourism. Since 1997, more than 35 students have worked on over a dozen contracts, totaling more than $1 million, with Caltrans, National Forest Scenic Byways, and the Bureau of Land Management.
Identifying the problem
While tourism is big business in California—the third largest employer and fifth largest contributor to the gross state product, according to the California Travel and Tourism Commission—many small communities don’t have the funds to promote their recreational resources. In 1997, Sheffield, in partnership with the Shasta Cascade Wonderland Association, a regional tourism marketing organization, determined that the North State network of National Forest Service Scenic Byways was an underutilized tourism planning and development tool.
“After doing some work with the communities, it became fairly clear that neither the communities nor the visitors saw these routes as experiences or as things to do—they were just roads to them,” says Sheffield.
An extensive set of meetings with interested parties around Northern California and classroom discussions with recreation students about how to make “an invisible asset visible” made it clear that they needed to give the byways some sort of face. That led Sheffield to the CSU, Chico communication design department and instructor Alan Rellaford (BA, Information and Communication Studies, ’82), who has 20 years of experience in corporate identity work in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
“This was an interesting problem that Emilyn posed,” says Rellaford. “She first said, I need a logo to symbolize this system, but the more we talked, the idea materialized of creating a family of marks, or emblems, that would symbolize some unique quality for each of the routes.”
Rellaford’s corporate identity systems class took on the project of creating a system for the seven scenic byways. They split into six teams of three students, initially working on six of the byways. Travel and research expenses for this project were paid for from the original project’s budget, which was funded by the USDA Forest Service.
“We assigned a route for each of the six teams to do research on the ground, so it paid for their gas, food, lodging, and film costs to create a slide show to share their findings,” says Rellaford.
Nikki Hertl, project manager for the partnership from 1997 to 2000, recalls her many road trips with Sheffield. “I really got to know Northern California and the people who live in these communities and want to increase the visibility of their areas,” she says. “That’s the best part about it—everyone seemed to be excited about these projects, especially the Scenic Byway project.”
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in recreation administration in 1997, Hertl had planned to move away, but her job as project manager allowed her to stay in Chico and get her master’s degree, something she says Sheffield encouraged her to do. “Emilyn taught me so much: professionalism, organizational skills, communication skills, working with multiple groups and managing multiple projects, which I have to do in my current job,” says Hertl, who is now the coordinator of conferences, off-campus housing, and food service at CSU, Chico.
The big presentation
Six different design systems for the network of scenic byways were presented to the client, and while there could be only one design system chosen, Sheffield says any one of the six would have been a tremendous addition to North State visibility. “We had several judges from off campus, and their reaction was, essentially, ‘we had no idea that you could expect this level of performance from every single student in the design team,’ ” she says.
The student whose design theme set the tone for the whole set—Ai Ikeda, a Japanese exchange student—was commissioned to create the seventh mark, and then was asked to design additional marks. Posters and postcards were created from the marks and distributed throughout the region and into the Bay Area, mostly to visitor centers.
The artwork is available in a number of different formats, including black-and-white and line art. “The idea was to be able to put tools into the hands of folks in these far-flung regions that didn’t necessarily have access to high-quality designers or the fund- ing needed to create such artwork,” says Rellaford.
CSU, Chico’s Sponsored Programs continues to host the Scenic Byway Network Web site at www.csuchico.edu/sp/tourism that allows people to easily get the artwork they need and also the design guidelines. “Many of the state and federal natural resource agencies use route-based programs or trail-based systems for many types of users, whether they’re hikers or off-road vehicle users,” says Sheffield. “This byway project is a really good example. There are all these unique things to do, whether it’s hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail, or seeing heritage sites like Tamarack, or fishing and enjoying the water recreation of Alpine County. Having an itinerary or a trail to connect the points of interest such as the historic features or recreation features makes the travel experience much easier and more satisfying.”
Pointing the way
The work on the scenic byways continues, branching out into other areas of the state. One of the recent projects out of the 20 that have been completed is for the Ebbetts Pass State Scenic Byway, a 58-mile stretch of State Highway 4 linking Arnold in Calaveras County and Markleeville in Alpine County—a rugged, somewhat remote mountainous region of the Gold Country between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite. Through a grant from the Federal Highways Administration, Sheffield worked with the Calaveras Council of Governments, Recreation Solutions (a Forest Service Enterprise Unit), and dozens of community partners to coordinate public workshops and assist with the preparation of a corridor management plan for the route. Rellaford acted as design director of the graphic illustrations to promote the project. Sheffield worked closely with many different groups to create a seamless experience for visitors and the surrounding communities.
“All of our projects are done in partnership with local community groups and the agencies and entities that are aligned with them,” notes Sheffield. “What you’re seeing [in the signs, posters, and brochures] is the end result of work that involves community groups, visitor bureaus, resource agency personnel, and transportation specialists. All of these folks have different levels of contact with the public, but they all have great insight into what the public is wanting and needing.”
Encouraging more tourists to visit the Ebbetts Pass area raised some concerns among residents about increased traffic and pollution.
George Dondero, executive director of the Calaveras Council of Governments, explained in an article in The Union Democrat that the experts from CSU, Chico understood the challenges of a project like this: “Sheffield understood the designation of a byway in a rural area where the old economies, lumber and mining, have declined and are being transferred to economies based on tourism.”
Last August, thousands of four-color postcards designed by CSU, Chico students rolled off the press of an Angels Camp print shop—the first printing of Ebbetts Pass Scenic Byway images slated to be a mainstay of tourism promotion along Highway 4. Along with 2,500 copies of 10 different postcards, 5,000 posters were printed that include the byway map, postcard illustration, and information about each of the places shown. Done in “steam trunk” stamp style, they highlight such local attractions as Grover Hot Springs State Park, Stanislaus River, and Calaveras Big Trees State Park.
An opportunity for discovery
Another big undertaking for the partnership, the “Discover Northern California” project for Caltrans in 1999, resulted in a series of full-color posters hanging in rest areas throughout the state. The 10-month project involved students from various departments, including Hertl from recreation, designers Janet Brockman, Heather Behrmann, Joe Colombo, and Darren Knowles from communication design, writer Tao Stadler from English, and cartographer Adam Henderson from geography. The design team expanded Brockman’s winning design to complete the initial four-poster series for the North State. Henderson, now an environmental scientist with the California Department of Water Resources in Red Bluff, had learned about the tourism projects from a fellow grad student who had heard that the partnership was looking for someone who could create maps.
“It was a great opportunity to take my skills in a cross-discipline area and work with other people,” recalls Henderson. “Working with people who didn’t necessarily know the language and the ins and outs of making maps, learning how to respond to their needs, was great interaction. And, then, working with Alan, a professional graphics person, was enlightening. He taught me about color and fonts and the layouts, and took my skills and brought them to that next level to make it a little more artistic.”
Henderson created an original map of California for the Discover Northern California series, which has turned into a statewide series with maps in all the rest areas on highways 5, 80, 395, and 101. Tim Smith from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) served as the California Roundtable on Recreation, Parks, and Tourism (CRRPT) liaison to the BLM-funded and CRRPT-sponsored project. He had originally approached the partnership about the rest area project, hoping to provide information to motorists about outdoor recreation opportunities.
“The Discover Northern California series was a successful example of seamless delivery of recreation information,” says Smith. “The fact that it has now been replicated throughout the state is proof that it worked.”
A roadmap for success
Hertl says she can’t thank Sheffield enough for giving her real-world experience. “It was a great benefit to me,” says Hertl. “These projects were for students, to get their hands on a real-life experience, and it seems like she is always doing that for students.”
Margaret Roy, a 2001 communication design graduate from Napa who came back to Chico to work with the partnership for six months in 2002, says this wasn’t her first experience working with clients through CSU, Chico.
“In the graphic design program at Chico, there is a lot of experiential work,” she notes. “The professors bring in a lot of clients, so that when you graduate and you are working out in the ’real world,’ you’ve already had some experience with clients. So it really just felt like an extension of what we’d already been doing when I was still in school.”
The Tourism and Communication Design projects have grown beyond the classroom and even California, with work in other Western states such as Steens Mountain in Oregon and Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where the Burning Man Festival is held. They’ve also done local work, such as image design for Lassen Volcanic National Park and a series of billboards commissioned by the city of Oroville that links them to the scenic byway.
“I’ve had it repeatedly reinforced that this particular style of art and graphic identity is very powerful and resonates strongly with key market segments that matter to these rural communities,” says Sheffield. “So much so, that I no longer do projects without that tool. The outcome matters too much not to use every tool you’ve got, and this has become an incredibly valuable one.”
So, the next time you pull into a California rest stop, be sure to notice the posters. There’s a little bit of CSU, Chico all across California.  |
