NFK2050 Comprehensive Plan
brand strategy / brand messaging / visual identity / layout / community engagement
City planning documents are dense, intimidating, and rarely feel like they were made for the average resident. For a plan that depends on broad community participation to succeed, that's a real barrier. Norfolk's Comprehensive Plan, NFK2050, needed a brand identity that's approachable, inclusive, and genuinely rooted in Norfolk, so residents feel invited into the process rather than talked at.
Norfolk, Virginia, is defined by its relationship with water. It's surrounded by it, and that geography was the starting point for the visual identity. With its distinctly coastal themes, NFK2050 resonated with the community and built a connection between Norfolk's people and the future of their city.
From Play to Plan:
It can be hard to gather high-quality feedback from residents, especially if they're uninterested in certain topics or nervous about making suggestions. That's why we gamified the discussion at an NFK2050 summer open house. Residents were divided into smaller groups where they used cards and tokens to discuss important plan topics such as housing, environment, and mobility.
Residents took turns reading aloud the action on the back of their card, and then they used their "vote" card to approve the action or raise a question or concern. Following the vote, residents discussed changes to the action that would secure approval from the entire group.
The card game provided valuable qualitative feedback on the plan's actions and revealed what actions residents valued most.
Perfecting the Plan:
At 294 pages, the plan document was no small feat. Keeping everything feeling cohesive was probably the biggest design challenge of the whole project. Maps, infographics, case studies, pull quotes, tables, and charts all had to coexist in the same document, each with its own layout and hierarchy needs. The brand's color system and typographic framework did a lot of the heavy lifting, keeping everything feeling unified without the document ever starting to feel repetitive or cookie-cutter.
