Citygarden
Citygarden https://blisscollaborative.com/wp-content/themes/corpus/images/empty/thumbnail.jpg 150 150 Bliss Collaborative https://blisscollaborative.com/wp-content/themes/corpus/images/empty/thumbnail.jpgCitygarden
Gateway Foundation
Citygarden, a project of the City of Saint Louis funded by the Gateway Foundation, has carved out three acres in the heart of Downtown and transformed them into an exhilarating urban oasis featuring modern and contemporary sculptures, lush landscape, reflecting pools, a café and a playful spray plaza. You won’t find walls or fences, admissions fees or Do Not Touch signs, because at Citygarden, you are always free: free to explore, free to play, free to be inspired.
Bliss Collaborative started working with the Gateway Foundation over 20 years ago, far before Citygarden came to life. In preparation for the park’s grand opening in 2009, the foundation engaged our team to design Citygarden’s logo, park signage and education program materials, including a website, self-guided educational tours, a mobile app (now retired) and audio tours.
Citygarden’s identity captures the moment when life recedes into art, with timeless typography that integrates with the park’s 20th-century modern art. The Citygarden logo quietly leads the design vocabulary for other branded pieces, especially education program materials.
We designed park signs to offer valuable written communication to visitors. The sign program utilizes warm bronze and vibrant aluminum to portray nature in a sophisticated yet easy going manner. From informational boards to directional signs, visitors are encouraged to learn, discover and play without rules.
The Citygarden Education Program—the website, self-guided educational tours and audio tours—presents an approachable, everyday appeal to an otherwise intellectual medium. The brochure’s exterior highlights nuances of the garden’s design while inside, succinct descriptions, whimsical line illustrations and a colorful map reveal the stories behind each sculpture.
Citygarden’s website brings all the personality of the park online. Bliss Collaborative redesigned and launched a new website for Citygarden in 2023. In the redesign, bright, vibrant colors, geometric shapes, modern typography and right hand navigation give web visitors a fun yet informative digital experience. On each artist page, users can pause and listen to audio that tells the story of both the artists and the art itself, recorded by St. Louis celebrities.
The layout of the website itself is both comprehensive and rule-breaking, just like Citygarden. Overlapping and vertical type makes for a disruptive yet immersive experience, inviting site visitors to wander curiously about by simply absorbing.
Standardized subpages allow for easy, quick edits—and from a user interface perspective, they provide just enough visual familiarity to prevent the feeling of being lost.
In celebration of Citygarden’s 10th Anniversary, Bliss Collaborative created icons of three new sculptures, refreshed design and home page navigation on Citygardenstl.org and generated educational tours for teachers and parents. St. Louis Magazine included the new icons and map in its article appearing in the A-List July 2019 issue.
Results
Citygarden won one of the nation’s most prestigious awards in urban planning, the 2011 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Amanda Burden Urban Open Space Award. It continues to attract out-of-towners, downtown residents, families and art lovers from across the region to celebrate the intersection of nature, art, and civic life.
48audio tours by recognized St. Louis narrators
7Kmonthly
web visitors
1,000,000
visitors annually
24years of
client service