Graphic Design — Raj Kottamasu

Freshkills Park Outreach

2008-2012. Part of the work I set out for myself on the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation’s Freshkills Park development team was to develop and design a range of outreach materials performing a variety of functions: explaining the history and infrastructure of the Freshkills Park site, the regulations and process governing it and the park development projects underway within it; and helping the public re-imagine a site that had been so identified with waste and environmental neglect as a refuge and space for recreation, regeneration and environmental stewardship.

Anchored by a set of visual identity guidelines produced by consultant Project Projects, I produced a range of materials to suit different contexts and points of engagement. I served as primary writer, editor and designer of these materials and products.

Tags: Strategy, Graphic Design, Illustration, Writing, Urban Planning

Site Tour Guide. Our outreach team found it was handing out numerous information sheets and brochures on public site tours. I wrote and designed a guide that compressed the many commonly asked questions and requested pieces of information into one document. The Guide was designed to fold accordion-style to allow the most information to be communicated on a single-page document, while remaining small enough to fit in a coat pocket (5” x 6.25”).

Fresh Perspectives Newsletter. I served as primary editor and designer of every issue in addition to writing a large share of the content, producing illustrations and taking a number of the photos.

School Presentations. I developed a variety of educational presentations aimed at student groups from elementary school through college. The presentations arrived at the story of park development by first establishing what landfills are and how they operate, how New York City’s waste management system worked previously and presently worked, the environmental cost of landfilling and the opportunities for reclamation.

Sneak Peak Promotional Materials. Advertisements for the 2010 and 2011 park preview events ran for a month on the Staten Island Ferry, and smaller (12"x19") posters and postcards were distributed at the Ferry Terminal, at cultural centers, schools and information fairs.

The photo collages are based on photos I had taken at the site plus a variety of other additions (most notably, the people).

Kite Kit. I conceived and designed these for the inaugural Sneak Peak park preview event, to recreationally activate the main event site, the top of the 150’-tall North Mound at the Freshkills Park site. Kits were composed of paper bags which could be colored on with crayon or marker, then reinforced with cardboard and attached to a spool and a surveyor’s tape tail.

Reusable Bags, Stainless Steel Water Bottles and Vinyl Window Stickers. designed for sale and giveaway by the Freshkills Park Alliance both to generate income and to support the park’s rebranding as a site of renewed environmental responsibility.

This is What Energy Democracy Looks Like

2015. A 22"x32" poster produced for Trade Unions for Energy Democracy and Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung to advocate for labor unions, globally, to take up the cause of public ownership of energy infrastructure. Through Meerkat Media, I co-produced, co-wrote the text, illustrated and designed the poster, in conjunction with an animated video.

Tags: Advocacy, Graphic Design, Illustration, Writing

Understanding the School Choice Experience

2013. Project storybook for a service design research project I co-led, through a fellowship with Public Policy Lab, investigating the successes and challenges of the NYC public high school choice process undertaken by 7th and 8th graders each year. I was recruited as the design fellow on the project (along with a strategy fellow and an ethnographer) but also contributed substantially to research strategy and synthesis of findings.

Subsequent to the research project, I created graphics and animation for a video documenting the project.

Tags: Research, Strategy, Graphic Design, Writing

ioby / Trick Out My Trip

2015. Report for a campaign supported by ioby and TransitCenter to support ten citizen-driven projects to improve or re-imagine a component of public transit service. There is also a web version.

Tags: Graphic Design, Urban Planning

Participatory Budgeting Project Outreach

2013-2015. Outreach materials commissioned by the Participatory Budgeting Project to support the emerging political process of participatory budgeting. I defined a graphic style and designed illustrations and deployed these in a variety of outreach media, including several videos.

Tags: Advocacy, Graphic Design, Illustration, Community

From the Ground Up

2010. ResilientCity.org held a design ideas competition to solicit new strategies from urban practitioners in planning and designing cities to be resilient to large-scale shocks like climate change and peak oil. Urban designer Michael Haggerty and I prepared a response to the prompt of designing for food self-sufficiency in an urban neighborhood.

Beyond concept development and writing, I laid out and developed design language for the proposal and produced photo-illustrations and diagrams.

Tags: Research, Strategy, Graphic Design, Illustration, Writing, Urban Planning, Urban Design

The Youth Farm Logo and Identity

2015. Logo and Visual Identity Guidelines for The Youth Farm, a 1-acre youth empowerment farm at the High School for Public Service in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Tags: Graphic Design, Illustration

Hester Street Collaborative Benefit Invitation

2014. A tabloid-sized fold-out poster invitation to the 12th annual benefit supporting community design and advocacy organization Hester Street Collaborative.

Tags: Graphic Design, Illustration

Inside Third + Bond

2013. Coffee table book (8"x10", 260pp, full color) adapting a five year-long feature on Brownstoner written by staff of The Hudson Companies Incorporated focused on the development of Third + Bond, the first LEED Platinum-certified residences in Brooklyn. I designed the book, helped structure its content better for the printed format and produced supplemental graphics.

Tags: Graphic Design

Film5000 Website

2013. Logo and website design for a film criticism blog. The blogger’s long-term project is to review 50 films from each of the 100 years between 1930 and 2030. The reviews are lengthy-but-unpretentious personal essays, and the site abounds with lists of personal favorites. My proposal was to condense as much of the navigation as possible while providing multiple points of entry and legible and reliable structure.

Tags: Graphic Design, Web

Zach Sherwin Websites and Identity

2013. New logo, social media sites and website—which I both designed and built—to launch comedian/rapper Zach Sherwin under his own name after years of performing under a stage name. Goals were straightforwardness, simplicity and playfulness. The site was built with custom PHP on Wordpress, to allow easy updating with no coding required by Zach. Also built a mobile-friendly version of the site.

Tags: Graphic Design, Web, Mobile

Detroit Free Press

2000-2001. As a Features Designer, I worked on every Features section of the newspaper, including special sections and inserts, as well as contributing original illustrations.

Tags: Graphic Design