Senior Designer Andrew O. Ellis loves Pittsburgh. Read why.

I may have been one of the only kids in Michigan to have this card on purpose.

If you don’t mind, I’m going to spend the next few paragraphs patting myself on the back.

Why? Because I’m part of a small and exclusive group. I’m a young person who moved TO Pittsburgh and stuck around. And more than that, I did it before it was cool.

You see, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit. One Christmas during the early 1990s, we came to Pittsburgh to visit relatives who at that time lived in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood. I don’t know if it was the rivers or the hills or the dinosaurs or what, but something about this town captured my imagination for the rest of my childhood. Pictures of the skyline adorned my bedroom walls. Bridges became more fascinating to me than cars and trucks, and the Pittsburgh Penguins became my hockey team – a move, in Red Wings territory, that was about as popular as being, say, a Cleveland Browns fan in Steeler Nation.

In Detroit, most of the art and design schools were rumored to be straight recruitment lines to the now-crumbling automotive industry – a path I wasn’t eager to follow. It seemed almost too perfect that I’d end up attending the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. I still had friends questioning the move as my high school graduation loomed, but I was feeling the sort of satisfaction that you feel when things start falling into place.

Art school is funny, though, because there’s a large hipster population in a place like that. People for whom it’s simply not cool enough to be into what’s cool; you have to have been into it BEFORE it was cool. Sure, maybe you love the current chart-topping rock band or hip-hop artist, but unless you were listening to them on bootlegs before they even signed with a record label, you don’t really GET them. Digging that movie that just came out? Shame you didn’t see the director’s early black & white short films – they were so much purer in vision. Naturally, I couldn’t aim for this kind of ultimate coolness, and I’m not sure I wanted to be that big of a snob anyway. Still, everyone wants to appear to be ahead of the curve.

In branding and advertising, of course, it’s ESSENTIAL to be ahead of the curve. Not TOO far ahead as to alienate people – but not so far behind that your audience finds your message to be old news by the time you get it out there either. There’s a happy medium to be found. A few years working in this business taught me that, but still, a desire to show that my personal life demonstrated some kind of inside knowledge lingered.

That doesn't look anything like a Primanti's sandwich, but good effort, Jon.

A few weeks ago, Fitting Group’s own Belinda wondered if the G-20 summit would elevate the city’s brand. Now, in the wake of the event, I can only confirm that it has. For weeks, the iron city was profiled positively in the international news media. NPR stories name-dropped beloved haunts like Jerry’s Records, and Jon Stewart used Primanti Brothers sandwiches in Daily Show punchlines. Sure, there were some unruly protests and some arguably overzealous reactions from law enforcement, but Pittsburgh was on the map again. More than that, Pittsburghers themselves reacted and prepared in a way that, I think, spoke well of our citizenry and showed that we’re ready to be taken seriously as what Newsweek called “America’s Venice,” or more poetically, as what a piece of confusing sidewalk-chalk art called “America’s Phoenix.”

I can’t tell you if the G-20 accomplished what it set out to do on an international level, but I can tell you that it did, I think, exactly what City leaders here hoped for. It showed that Pittsburgh isn’t a smoky steel town anymore, but a historic, cultural city with a bright economic future and a finger on the pulse of the green movement. It’s something that I figured out almost a decade ago now, settling down here years before even cutting-edge companies like Apple and Google set up shop in town. It’s a move I’m happy to have made, as well as one that I hope thousands of people my age and younger will be making in the near future. And yeah, I feel sorta cool about it. Maybe not pre-DeStijl-White-Stripes cool, but let’s say buying-a-home-and-putting-down-roots-in-an-upwardly-mobile-city cool.