City of Gardena
Brand Identity & Design
The City of Gardena is a South Bay community of about 60,000 people with a personality most cities twice its size would envy: diverse, food-forward, and rooted in a history that stretches from Japanese American agriculture to one of LA County's most distinctive local cultures.
What it didn't have was a visual identity to match.
Gardena brought me in to build the brand and design systems the city's communications function had never had, and to put them to work across social, presentations, and templates.
My Role
Brand identity
Visual system design
Social templates
Presentation design
Before
Where Things Stood
Like most municipal communications teams operating lean, Gardena's social presence defaulted to what was fast: flyers, text-heavy event announcements, and graphics that communicated information without communicating the city.
There was no shared visual language across platforms or departments.
After
The Identity System
The palette anchors on Electric Blue as the hero tone, Navy Blue for structural weight, and Lime Green as a high-contrast accent. Ice Blue serves as a clean background tone in the presentation system, and Yellow rounds out the palette as a functional color reserved for alerts and urgent communications.
The combination is bold enough to own the feed and flexible enough to scale across templates, decks, and video.
Green stays in the system because it should: "Gardena" traces directly to the city's agricultural past, and the color has always been part of its civic identity.
Archivo is the lead display typeface. When paired with Merriweather, they give the system both edge and readability across post sizes and presentation formats.
After
Social Design
The identity system was applied across templates for Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, covering everything from community events and job postings to emergency alerts.
Each template follows a consistent content hierarchy so a small team can execute on-brand posts quickly, without starting from scratch every time.
After
Presentation Design
The system extended into Gardena's State of the City 2026 presentation, "Stronger at 95," built for the city's 95th anniversary event. The design approach kept on-screen text minimal so the audience stays with the speaker, not the slide. Each layout was built to carry the brand at full size in a live room.
