Currents Newsletter
Burbank Water and Power is a community-owned utility as such they make keeping their customer-owners informed a priority. They produce a quarterly newsletter with important information and timely articles that help keep the community in the loop.
Designing Forward
Oct. 2019
When BWP first came to us to start designing their quarterly newsletter, consistency was very important to them. The newsletter is widely read by their customers, so we wanted to make sure we didn’t alienate anyone with drastic design changes.
With that in mind, we designed this issue with elements that pointed back to past issues but gave us the freedom to move the design forward with clean typography and solid page design.
Developing an illustration style
March 2020
Burbank came to us with a handful of existing illustrated assets that suggested a style, but for the purposes of enhancing the storytelling in their quarterly Currents newsletter, we needed to find a way to adapt and expand on these assets. Shapes were kept clean with flat colors, with the addition of two-tone hue applications to provide depth to the palette and dimension to the illustrations. These and a few other simple rules allowed us to create and expand on an illustration set that is modern with a hint of mid-century influence, and is adaptable to both flat and isometric perspectives, giving us the freedom to apply the illustration style to solving different communication needs based on the content of each issue of the newsletter.
Telling Complicated Stories
June 2020
For Burbank’s Annual Water Quality Report, we were given the challenge of telling the story of how the city gets its water. This complex process had to be made into something easily digestible for the newsletter’s readers. We went through multiple rounds with a copywriter, the client, and experts to create an infographic that explained where the water comes from and how it is processed.
