Motor House

Motor House Rebranding

The Challenge

Motor House is an up-and-coming arts hub located in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District. In its very first years of existence, the building was home to one of Baltimore’s first car dealerships. After several other organizations and businesses came and went, the building was acquired by the Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation (BARCO) in 2013. The nonprofit real estate developer was founded to create beautiful, affordable, and safe spaces for Baltimore’s creative community.

Our team faced the daunting task of starting—essentially from square one— and deciding what the mission, vision, and ultimately brand voice of the space would be after the building had gone through so many life cycles.

Another challenge was that shortly after the building re-opened in 2016, a temporary brand identity was applied to all of the graphic design (including the interior). The primary use of the space when it re-opened was as a home for artist studios. An extended “rebrand” of the building needed to include the use of a black box theater. Ultimately, we had to find a better way to tie all of the vibrant happenings in the building together into a compelling story.

Recommendations

Our team decided to move forward with drafting a new mission statement that would better guide our community’s vision for the space. This enhanced mission statement would ultimately help us draft new brand identity guidelines, which was one of the biggest blocks in our path to telling a more compelling and cohesive story.

As you can see on the left, the previous graphic design had a retro feel to it, to pay tribute to the building’s previous life as a car dealership. In order to realize our new mission statement, we decided to overhaul all of the graphic design elements to better reflect this enhanced vision for the space.

Results

In addition to leading our team in drafting updated brand identity guidelines, I was responsible for project managing a comprehensive website redesign, which included: drafting an RFP, scoring and vetting proposals, and working with the contracted vendor to deliver the product on-time and on-budget. I also took ownership of copywriting and designing a new weekly email newsletter and designing most of the event posters.