Hagerstown Choice Neighborhoods Plan:
visual identity / layout / storytelling / community engagement / art direction
The Hagerstown Choice Neighborhoods Plan is a community-driven planning process that developed a vision for the future redevelopment of three Hagerstown Housing Authority (HHA) housing sites. With Hagerstown residents, the HHA, and city officials all at the table, the process was as much about earning community trust as it was about planning for the future.
My role was to build a brand and a suite of materials that could support that process, from the earliest engagement events all the way through to the final plan document. That meant designing for a wide range of formats, including large-scale charrette boards, t-shirts, comment cards, a photo backdrop, and a community care package filled with branded goodies like stickers, a mug, a tote, and even a logo cookie.
Community Care Package
I designed a "Choice Community Care Package" that was hand-delivered to residents by HHA partners. Receiving something thoughtful and well-designed feels personal in a way that a flyer never does, and that was the whole point: to signal to residents that their input was genuinely valued before asking anything of them.
The package encouraged participation in the Needs Assessment Survey, an important tool for understanding current conditions in the neighborhood before planning began. Every item, from the sticker sheet to the brochure, was visually cohesive and on-brand, reinforcing a sense of care and credibility. With the help of the care package, we exceeded our survey target and gathered valuable insights from the community.
Engaging with the Community
The biggest challenge was making the brand feel like it belonged to the community, not to a government agency or planning firm. The bold color palette, playful typography, and graphic shapes were all chosen to feel energetic and welcoming, the kind of identity that residents would actually want to engage with and take home. Seeing the photo backdrop show up in real community fair photos, with kids holding up their vision cards in front of the logo, made it clear the brand was doing its job.
Grow, Build, Thrive.
The final plan document is where the brand really came to life. Across more than 200 pages, the bold color palette, playful typography, and graphic shapes established in the identity system had to work across a huge range of content, from data-heavy infographic spreads and transit maps to Community Ambassador profiles and resident quote pages.
Pages that would have been dense with data sets came to life with bold, colorful infographics, and sections like "Meet Our Community Ambassadors!" were designed to make sure community voices felt just as prominent as the planning data. The result is a document that reads less like a report and more like a book about the people who live in the Hagerstown Choice Neighborhood.
The Plan contains a variety of content types, and each one requires a different approach. Some pages were designed for planners and city officials scanning data, while others, like the Ambassador profiles and quote cards, were really for the residents themselves. Designing a document that could speak to both audiences without losing its personality was one of the more interesting challenges of the project.
With three typefaces and multiple type styles in play, maintaining a clear hierarchy throughout the document required constant attention. Keeping the document feeling clean meant being intentional about when to let the typography be expressive and when to pull back and let the content speak for itself. The result is a document that feels dynamic and full of personality without ever becoming hard to read or visually overwhelming.
