KHS art students develop logos for local organization
Kellogg High School art students Kaia Palmer, Lena Erlendson, and Kaden Keller were honored during an assembly last week for their recently created logos for the Friends of the River Coalition (FORC). Along with Russell Fields (not pictured), the four winners were chosen out of several submissions to have their logos featured on hats, shirts, mugs, and other FORC promotional items. Pictured from the left are Palmer, FORC president Dawn Wiksten, Erlendson, Keller, FORC vice president Rob Archer, and KHS art teacher Rachel Krusemark.
JOSH McDONALD
The top four logos that were selected by the FORC board members and the artist responsible for them.
KELLOGG – The Friends of the River Coalition (FORC) have undergone a rebrand.
Earlier in the school year, FORC founder and president Dawn Wiksten and vice president Rob Archer approached Kellogg High School art teacher Rachel Krusemark about developing a new logo for the group.
Recently, the students in Krusemark’s entry-level Art I classes recently completed their projects and submitted them to FORC to determine who the winner would be.
“We knew we needed to brand ourselves,” Wiksten said. “But we didn’t realize we would have such a hard time picking the winner.”
In the end, FORC’s four board members couldn’t land on just one or two top entries, but instead picked their top four.
The four students were honored during a brief assembly in the KHS cafeteria on Friday afternoon.
Kaia Palmer and Russell Fields tied for third place, Kaden Keller took second place and Lena Erlendson was the first-place choice.
Wiksten and Archer were on hand to present to the winners and explain their logic behind going with multiple winners instead of just one.
“All of the submissions were fabulous,” Wiksten said. “But we’re doing T-shirts, hats, mugs, stickers, you name it and we’re putting our logo on it. These are things that we can use to raise money for FORC and they’ll bear our brand.”
Once they decided they needed a new logo, the situation quickly became, ‘how do we get a logo,’ and some quick thinking from the board led them right to Krusemark.
“We figured this was a great resource for us to tap,” Archer said. “There was quite a bit of learning for us, because when you’re trying to describe what you’re wanting for a brand or a logo, you don’t realize all of the little idiosyncrasies that go into something like that. They really did a good job for us.”
The requirements for the submission surrounded the incorporation of the FORC vessel that pulls the tires and debris from the river, as well as the river itself.
Krusemark explained that the project took each artist quite a bit of time, and several revisions — Keller himself told the News-Press that his second-place submission was actually his fourth draft of the project.
The other non-winning submissions (of which there were many), are going to get their day in the sun too. Wiksten plans on having each of them printed onto a fabric square that will be incorporated into a large quilt that will be auctioned off during FORC’s annual fundraiser.
FORC is a small nonprofit organization founded in 2020 with the goal of responsible growth management and infrastructure development along the North Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River — This includes funding dumpsters, parking sites and boat launches.
The group has also commissioned a vessel that removes large debris from the riverbed.
For more information, please visit the Friends of the River 2020 Facebook page.
