 Cville Pride Festival 5K Run and Walk Join us for the inaugural Cville Pride 5K! Whether you're a seasoned runner, prefer a leisurely walk, or a fabulous sashay, everyone is welcome to participate. Don your gayest apparel for a morning of movement, joy, and community spirit. Together, we'll stride forward with pride. Runners and walkers will head out from FIREFLY Restaurant + Game Room on East Market Street, then take Riverside Ave. to Riverview Park. There, participants will enjoy over a mile of flat, paved trail by the river. Turning onto a short stretch of gravel around Hogwaller Brewing and Rivanna River Company, the race will re-enter the Woolen Mills neighborhood on Caroline Ave., connect to Fairway Ave., and coast downhill on Chesapeake before a final turn onto Meade Ave. back to FIREFLY Restaurant + Game Room. This event is part of the Cville Pride festival, which aims to create a vibrant, visible, and inclusive LGBTQ+ community presence in Charlottesville, Albemarle, and the surrounding region that promotes equality through events, education, outreach, and advocacy. This is a volunteer-led event and all proceeds from registrations go to Cville Pride. Additional Info: Packet pick-up: Friday, September 25th at FIREFLY between 4:00pm - 7:00pm, and Saturday before the race, from 7:00am - 7:45am. We encourage pick up on Friday if possible. Parking: There is one small parking lot at the FIREFLY building. Public parking is available along Meade Ave., E. Market St., other surrounding streets, and Meade Park.   When I started working on graphics for the CVILLE Pride 5K, I wanted the design to accomplish two things immediately: read as Pride and read as a race. That sounds simple, but it meant figuring out how to use a lot of potentially competing visual elements—Pride colors, race information, a 5K course map, a promotional hat, event details and registration information—without making everything fight for attention. Starting with the logo The logo began with a very simple hierarchy: CVILLE PRIDE 5K I wanted “5K” to be impossible to miss. It is deliberately oversized and black, while “CVILLE” carries the color and “PRIDE” stays neutral in gray. For CVILLE, each letter uses a different color from the rainbow palette. Rather than coloring every element of the logo, I liked letting that one word do most of the work. I also created a small Progress Pride-inspired color bar that could become part of the visual system rather than simply adding a rainbow somewhere because this was a Pride event. From there, I experimented with different configurations of the logo. One version stacks the three elements vertically, with the color bar between CVILLE and PRIDE. Another moves the bar below PRIDE and places the complete mark inside a circle against broad Pride stripes. Those experiments helped establish something important: the identity did not need a lot of additional decoration. The typography, scale and color were already doing most of the work. Moving from a logo to an event poster A logo can work beautifully by itself and still fall apart once it has to share space with actual information. The poster needed to include:
Early drafts explored a lot of different treatments. I tried full rainbow backgrounds, diagonal stripes, horizontal stripes, colored typography, heavy borders and several different placements for the hat and map. Some were visually exciting, but they also taught me where the design could become too busy. The strongest direction ended up being one of the simplest. The final system gives the CVILLE PRIDE 5K identity the entire top of the poster. Immediately below it is a black band containing the date and start time, followed by a smaller line identifying Firefly. Then the map gets the majority of the page. That was an important change from some of the earlier ideas. A course map should actually function as a course map. Putting large type, decorative elements or promotional graphics over too much of it defeated the point of including it. Letting the map breathe The course itself has a lot of visual information, so I intentionally faded the underlying map while keeping the route and mile markers visible. That created a quieter background and allowed the course line to become the important element. The promotional hat presented another design problem. It was useful information—and a fun part of the event—but it could easily become the dominant image on the page. In later drafts, I reduced its size and treated it as a secondary callout with “Available on Race Day!” rather than allowing it to compete with the race identity or obscure the course. That distinction made a big difference. Creating a visual system instead of one poster One of my favorite parts of the process was realizing that the small color bar could become a recurring design element. It appears beneath the CVILLE wordmark and again near the registration information at the bottom of the poster. That repetition connects the sections without requiring a full rainbow background. It also gives the race graphics something that can carry easily into other formats: social graphics, registration pages, signs, shirts, bibs or other event materials. The registration URL became another strong anchor. Rather than using a generic “SIGN UP NOW!” message, I placed INSTAGRAM.COM/CHARLOTTESVILLEPRIDE (and I've recommended the create the URL RUNSIGNUP.COM/CVILLEPRIDE) prominently inside a black footer. That gives the design both a visual finish and an immediately useful call to action. Adapting the design for Instagram The Instagram version was not simply a matter of shrinking the poster. The proportions are different, which changes how every element relates to the others. I tested several versions, including some with large Pride-striped backgrounds. Those were colorful, but they also pulled attention away from the information. The cleaner version ultimately worked better: white space around the identity, the same black date bar, the large course map, the smaller hat callout and the registration footer. The poster and Instagram graphic now share the same design language without having to be identical. That is ultimately what I wanted from the project. What I learned from the drafts The biggest improvement did not come from adding something. It came from removing competition. The strongest versions use fewer graphic devices, establish a clear hierarchy and allow each element to have a job:
And the Pride colors connect everything without having to dominate everything. There were plenty of drafts along the way, but that is exactly why I like showing the process. Design rarely arrives fully formed. The interesting part is seeing what happens when an idea moves from a logo to an actual communication system—and then gets revised until the hierarchy feels obvious.
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