Carpenter’s Shelter supports the homeless to achieve sustainable independence through shelter, guidance, education, and advocacy. Carpenter’s Shelter is located in Alexandria, VA and serves more than 1,000 homeless and formerly homeless children and adults each year.
The shelter has become a pillar of the Alexandria community that it serves, so for their 2019 annual report, I chose to adapt the format of a community newsletter. By using a rich, full-color design and printing on newsprint, we were able to deliver the content in a way that felt authentic, and took on a unique Carpenter's Shelter flair.
For their end-of-year mailer in 2019, the shelter chose to focus on telling the stories of a select few clients. Keying on a testimonial from one of those clients, they expressed interest in exploring what a Carpenter's Shelter fairytale would look like. I developed a number of illustrations to help bring their fairytale to life while remaining true to their style, and used a purposeful color palette to integrate the story with their brand.
In 2019, plans were made to relocate the shelter in order to begin a redevelopment project in partnership with Alexandria Housing Development Corporation. This project, which would see the facility completely rebuilt from the ground up, would allow Carpenter’s Shelter to find strategic solutions to homelessness in the region by providing temporary and permanent supportive housing.
To fully fund the redevelopment project, the New Heights Campaign was launched, which aimed to raise $2 million. In keeping with the reinvention of the shelter itself, I built upon the well known Carpenter's Shelter logo to developed something new. The new mark was influenced by the architecture of the redesigned building, but also leveraged existing brand equity by including the original logo within it. The logo first debuted on a brochure that I designed to introduce the campaign to the community.
