This branding project was an extension of the Design Bloc and Hunter Hills relationship from one of the co-design classes held by Design Bloc. I was a part of this project while being employed at Design Bloc. The project spanned nine months and was slipt into three phases, three months each phase. Phase 1 was research, phase 2 was initial ideation and brand language, and phase 3 was logo development and branding guidelines.

    From the beginning, I was made point-of-contact on the ground level between Design Bloc and the Hunter Hills Neighborhood Associations. Ms. Charlene Johnson was the president of the association at the time.

    In phase 1, the people from Design Bloc working on this co-design project were my leads, Shawn Harris and Hanan Abdi, and my coworkers, Cole Campbell, Yuma Tanaka, Tynan Purdy, Hunter Schaffer, and Jordan Lym. The research phase of our project with Hunter Hills lasted from April 2021 to June 2021. We interviewed 23 residents. 10 legacy residents like Ms. Jean Allen, who has lived in the neighborhood for most of her life. She gave us wisdom on what it means to be a tight-knit community. She said, "You cannot grow alone, you have to grow together. You have to look out for each other and help each other".

    I conducted 12 out of the 23 of these interviews, helped develop the interview guide, and was responsible for contacting the residents of the Hunter Hills Neighborhood to set up these interviews. I was the point of contact between Hunter Hills and Design Bloc for the entire project.

    Through interviews, walkarounds, trash clean-ups, surveys, and feedback, we understood the story of Hunter Hills and the values the community stood for. We talked with the families who built the homes in the community by hand to learn the neighborhood's history. We found out that the residents want to revive the sense of connectedness across the community by building strong relationships with their neighbors. We saw landmarks like Proctor Creek, the creek that runs through the neighborhood, the McClendon Hospital, used in times of segregation, and the Hunter Hills First Baptist Church, founded by a family that still lives in the area.

    After all the interviews, the survey results noted, and the walkaround notes added, we compiled all of the information into a miro board. From there, we took the information (each piece on a sticky note) and performed coding to deduce this information down into easily digestible topics. We deduced these groups into “I want” statements, and then we combined all of these statements into a Qualtrics survey using the Likert scale and sent it to the residents to make sure our deductions were still as true as the original information.

    Throughout the research process and the entire project, we would create presentations of our work every month to present at the monthly Hunter Hills Neighborhood Association Meetings.

    I was responsible for giving those presentations every month of the whole project and all of my co-workers and I were responsible for creating the presentations.
At the end of phase 1, we presented the culmination of our research.

    Phase 2 of the project consisted of taking the research and developing it into the language of the brand; imperative statement, core values, and values proposition. From the language, we hunted for images that visually spoke to the brand so far. We held two co-design workshops to work with the residents to see what language and images were resonating with the community as a whole.

    The leads of phase 2 remained the same, and my co-workers were Cole Campbell, Yuma Tanaka, and Hunter Schaffer.

    We decided to host co-design workshops to work with the community to iterate on these elements. We hosted two workshops - one online and one in the Hunter Hills First Baptist Church. For the workshops, we showed the imperative statements (we had three at the time) and asked the community to circle ones that resonated with them. Then we discussed what ones need some work and what ones are representative of the community. Afterward, we did a card sort of about 15 different traits the Hunter Hills brand could emphasize and asked each person to choose their top three. Then we had a set of 15 different mood boards, the community members took their top three core values and found three images from across the mood board that they thought visually represented their values. We had interesting discussions about what pride in your community was in the visual form and got to see what imperatives, values, and images resonated with the community.

    Now that we finalized all the language and have visuals to start ideating off of, phase three was a series of converging and diverging stages of logo ideation. We spent 2 months on logo development to make sure we got it right. Below is the sketching progress of my team and then some sketches that just belong to me.

    Even thought my logo wasnt chosen, I was responsible for finalizing the color options and typography of the logotype.