A region at a crossroads
Between 2019 and 2022, traffic fatalities in northeastern Illinois rose 29%. The risk wasn't distributed evenly — low-income and Black communities bore a disproportionate share. The problem wasn't a lack of data. It was a lack of participation. Traffic safety planning has long been a technical, quantitative discipline. Crash reports. Engineering standards. Infrastructure budgets. Those tools are necessary, but they can't capture where a parent avoids crossing with her kids, or which intersection a cyclist stops trusting after dark. Lived experience fills gaps that data alone can't reach. Safe Travel for All was designed to close that gap.

A first of its kind
The initiative brought Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) and the Illinois Department of Transportation together with county-level traffic safety planning teams across six counties in northeastern Illinois. The goal: use community input to drive real safety action plans. Daylight led the regional equitable engagement strategy. They brought Span in to build the visual brand identity.

The brief had a genuine tension inside it. An identity that read as a government program would satisfy institutions and lose residents. One that felt too approachable would lose authority with state and county partners. The system had to hold both without softening either.

Naming it
Span started with the name. "Safe Travel for All" is direct, active, and built around what people care about — not planning terminology. It gives a complex, multi-agency initiative a single claim that anyone can stand behind, without translation.

The language of the road
The visual system draws from signals people already read without thinking: the lane striping, directional arrows, and pavement markings codified in the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, MUTCD. These aren't aesthetic references. They're cues people process at every intersection, crosswalk, and school zone. Span borrowed that recognition and turned it toward participation. Safety stripes became messaging containers. Chevron forms carried directional energy. Sign geometries became modular frames for information. The system communicates movement and collective action before a word lands.

The wordmark holds the same logic — industrial stencil construction, engineered cuts that read as infrastructure, paired with enough graphic energy to stop someone at a farmers market or a church hall. Official enough for a state agency. Present enough for the street.