The Broadway Community Design Overlay (CDO) serves as a manual for anyone seeking to develop a property or open a business in a historic district of Downtown Los Angeles—a neighborhood that is looking to support the adaptive reuse of its buildings. In an effort to rebrand this work program, the Graphics team updated the manual to help users understand the City’s local zoning rules and how they apply within the Broadway CDO.
Historically, City Planning developed text-heavy CDO documents with very few visual aids illustrating the design guidelines. Building on the recent rebranding efforts, City Planning’s Graphics Unit updated the template for the Broadway CDO, and established a standard look for future CDO documents in the process.
The Team chose a consistent color story to brand these documents as part of the overarching Community Plan (CP) work program, while also including images that would supplement the content and text. For example, Graphics took neighborhood-specific shots to break up the content into digestible sections. Roboto typeface is used to ensure the legibility of these documents, producing end products that are functional, intuitive, and easy to navigate.
Graphics created the layout in Adobe InDesign, using paragraph and character styles, master pages, and libraries to share styles, color palettes, fonts, and other library assets across the CDO and CP documents. Also, used Photoshop and Lightroom to modify original photos and bring the document to life.
