Brand identities for cities: Enhancing graphic designer expertise in city branding practice

City branding has emerged as a unique branding practice within the last decade, encouraging research in related disciplines such as place marketing, urban development, visual communication, and graphic design. Although the graphic design field has played a significant role in creating a city's visual identity, graphic design as a stand-alone practice will not be accounted as an effective engagement in city branding development. Therefore, graphic designers should be encouraged to actively and comprehensively collaborate with other disciplines in order to produce sustainable and successful city branding. City branding has become recognized as vital to a city's tourism economy, and graphic designers have been detached from the city branding team hierarchy to primarily serve an outcome, rather than regarded as an essential element to the whole city branding process. Place marketing scholars restrain the graphic designer expertise to produce an impactful visual identity that leads to a successful city branding strategy. In fact, graphic designers are qualified to be involved in city branding strategy as they have design thinking skills which is the embodiment of skills of research, creative thinking and visual thinking. This research project draws on skills in visual research, design research and graphic design thinking, to expose how graphic design is vital to all facets of city branding development, drawing on case studies of successful and unsuccessful city branding strategies. It examines the work of influential city brand identity designers and case studies of graphic design students' studio project to approach a model of city logo development. The outcome of this research will be a guideline for city visual identity development within a graphic design context that is beneficial for city governments, place marketers, graphic design consultants, advertising bureau, graphic design educators, and graphic design students or parties that are interested in developing successful city branding strategies.