Metropolitan Transportation Plan

Every five years the Metropolitan Planning Organization is responsible for writing and submitting transportation plans for 25 years in the future. Previous plans had a logo and some light visual identity, but when I came on at NCTCOG, I built a relationship with the MTP team and together we dreamt up a bigger vision for graphic design on this project. The Mobility 2050 brand was born!

 

Brand elements designed include:

  • Logo

  • Postcards

  • PowerPoint Template

  • Web imagery

  • Iconography

  • Timeline (right)

  • Art Direction

 
 
 

Various custom web illustrations for the Mobility 2050 website.

 
 
 

The plan includes 16 goals that are sorted into four buckets. The team asked for a series of icons that would illustrate these high-level concepts. Above are four sketch options for each of the four concepts: Implementation, Mobility, Quality of Life, System Sustainability

 
 

Design + Art Direction

The MTP team requested a bilingual postcard to help entice members of the community to participate in the Mobility 2050 survey (left). This postcard was sent to more than 20,000 North Central Texans. I especially enjoyed designing this in English and Spanish, carefully distinguishing between the two languages while not creating a hierarchy that subtly communicated one’s importance over the other.

To go with the postcard the team requested an animated paid social media ad (above). I provided art direction for the ad, which was animated by a colleague.

 

Key Brand Need: Flexibility

The core output of the MTP team is a humongous document, hundreds of pages long, that the Metropolitan Transportation Plan team puts together. That document lives in Word, not in InDesign, and is owned by their team. So I owned the creative vision, but the MTP team lead put it into practice where it counted.

I developed the design guidelines (left) and coached the MTP team on how to use Microsoft Word SmartArt in line with this brand. This is a great example of my design work at NCTCOG: we are not producing flashy designs with cutting edge technologies. Instead, I often use design thinking to get the best-looking output from simple, non-design software, making the best use we can of the resources available to us.