Design Corps 1: NCR — Riya Parekh

Design Corps: Newburgh Climate Ready (NCR)

Branding
Web Design
Research
Collaboration

Designers: Riya Parekh, Hazel Huang, Solace Duval and Yujin Kwak.
Design Corps (DC) Creative Director: Michael L Kelly

This project was a collaborative project where within a team of 4, we were tasked to explore and address the needs of our client; Newburgh Climate Ready. They are a committee based in Newburgh, NY who work on slowing climate change. As a subcommittee of the Conservation Advisory Council, they work to implement the Climate Smart Community Program - a New York State program that helps cities take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to a changing climate. Their mission is to mobilize stakeholders like you to reduce our greenhouse emissions while creating transparency, accessibility and accountability in this process.

We employed empathic design approaches to produce branding and marketing materials - logos, visual identity, website, print materials and a social media campaign. We executed a 3-part model, wherein each part builds on or is in dialogue with the others:

Phase I: Preliminary Research:
Initially, our team researched and analyzed the client’s position and communication needs. Our approach included participating in brainstorming sessions and conducting extensive research on who NCR was and establishing their goals and objectives. Thereafter, we formulated a plan of action and our design strategy, which included making mood boards, ideating upon the campaign language and brand identity. This information was then presented to the Design Corps Creative Director and the client.

The image on the left above is our moodboard which allowed us to communicate the look and feel of the project to our client and based on that we decided upon our final brand colors (image on right).

Phase II: Design/Content Development:
Depending on the findings of our Preliminary Research, we began developing a design solution. At this stage we worked upon the visual language of the identity, decided upon the type direction and finalized our set of deliverables; Logo, Website, Social Media Posts, Letterhead, Event Flyer Template, Sandwich Board Footer and Postcards. Concepts were then presented to the client, with revisions made and re-presented as necessary.

On the left above are some of our brand components. This formed the visual language of our brand identity and we repeated these elements across all deliverables in order to make the designs look and feel more cohesive. Our visual elements included:

Using colored type in the headers, white type behind colored foreground and including footers.
When using Newburgh imagery and community photos, overlaying them in bright color filters and placing them in backgrounds. It was important to incorporate images of residents interacting with their environment to further amplify their voices and experiences and bring forth a sense of belonging.
Utilizing enlarged numbers to increase recall value and further emphasize the steps needed for a Newburgh to be a Climate Smart Community.
Incorporating supporting lines under headings and colored shapes to represent that the smallest actions can lead to big changes.
Usage of rectangular shapes is a representation of bricks to symbolize the idea of NCR trying to build-up Newburgh brick by brick to be more of a climate resilient city.

On the right above are our chosen typefaces. We wanted something that was clean, freely accessible on the web and legible in small writing. Additionally, having one font with different weights is easier to manage, especially for clients like NCR who don't have any designers on their team. Furthermore, Newburgh is a bilingual city and so we often had to design keeping in mind both the spoken languages; English and Spanish. Therefore, we made sure we used typefaces that were available in both languages.

Above are some of the iteration sketches during the logo design process.

Phase III: Design Implementation:
After our design direction was approved by the client, and budgets and schedules were determined we began the creation of the final designs.

Website
We began our website design process by creating a site map which helped us and the client to communicate what pages should be included as well as allowed us to visualize the navigation. We used Figma to create wireframes and layouts of the different pages which would then be sent to a developer provided by the client.

Below are the Home and About Us pages.

Below are the Get Involved and Climate Actions (part of the Climate Smart Community Program) pages.

A video that demonstrates the navigation of the website.

Social Media Posts
For the social media campaign we created a carousel template which followed a narrative structure:

1. Headline / Intro: Don’t you want this benefit, good thing? Help Newburgh...

2. Rationale: “If government [passes this action/does this action] then you/we can benefit [in this way]”
…help lower energy bills and reduce harmful greenhouse gasses emissions while making homes and businesses more comfortable.

3. Explanation with some more detail about the specific climate smart community action.

4. Call to action and Contact: Attend, sign up, educate yourself more through the website, reach out on email, social media, etc.

Part of the social media campaign included spotlighting certain people from the community who were doing their bit to help reduce greenhouse emissions and fight climate change by creating Climate Champions. (Designed in both English and Spanish).

Letterhead

Event Flyer Template Sandwich Board Footer Template

Above on the left is an event flyer design and on the right is a sandwich board footer design. We created a sandwich board footer template that could potentially be distributed to small businesses owners for them to place them in their existing boards to show their support of NCR. Thereby, further promoting NCR and their mission.

Postcards
We chose to design postcards as it was a deliverable that could be distributed and sold to the residents for them to write in their demands for change and potentially sent to policy makers and influential figures in the city.

Summary