Basic Needs Hub, Design Brief
Experiential Learning · Case study
a community college, Brand and Marketing System
The brief behind the hub’s brand identity system, built as experiential learning.
Project Overview
What the hub is
Campus Cares is consolidating its student support services into a single destination in the former bookstore building, a centralized hub that brings together food access, social services, community resources, and wellness support under one roof. Renovation is phased: the food pantry and bodega area come first, and full buildout follows as funding and renovation are completed.
Timeline note: The grocery area is contingent on a $40,000 electrical upgrade that is currently unfunded. Design can proceed in parallel, but physical environmental graphics for that zone should be held until funding is confirmed.
What this brief is for. This document scopes the branding and marketing system for the Basic Needs Hub. The full hub buildout, programs, partnerships, physical renovation, funding, is being shaped by a campus committee that Michelle Blomberg serves on. The work showcased here is narrower and more specific: a complete brand identity, marketing collateral, signage, and mural concepts, built by a two-person team. Michelle (Digital Media Arts faculty) leads the project. A recent Digital Media Arts alumna, now at ASU, executes the design work through an approved AmeriCorps internship (see the funding-status note below). AI is part of the production workflow for research, briefs, and asset development. This is experiential learning embedded inside a real campus initiative.
✓ Funding status (approved). The AmeriCorps internship for this project is approved. Each contract is a 300-hour term that earns the intern a $1,500 education award toward tuition or loans, and a second contract is available. AmeriCorps has also invited the college to cost-share toward hourly pay on top of the education award, and is checking whether the national office will approve added hourly salaries; a hub grant we are writing would fund that piece. The education-award placement is confirmed now; the additional paid-salary layer is promising but not yet final.
Goal
The identity system and its manual
The deliverable is a complete brand identity system for the named hub, delivered as a design and identity manual: the mark, typography, color palette, and voice dialed in, with clear rules and templates for applying the brand across everything the hub needs, signage, murals, promotional animations, brochures, all of its documentation, and kids materials like a coloring book and a kids mural. The manual includes a template library of the iconography, color palette and type palette.
What the client should expect. The team will consult with the client to identify the most important pieces and produce a few of the highest-priority brand items as part of the system. The full set of signage, murals, brochures, and kids materials is out of scope this grant year, because a full brand rollout is too big to finish in one term. In a following year the actual assets could be produced by the college students, the graphic design class, the design studio course, or the Art Club, and/or a second, stackable AmeriCorps grant that funds another production term. A mockup or two, a mural or a key piece, is a stretch goal only if time allows.
Process
How the work happens
The process moves in order: discovery and research first (visit the space, talk to students, build an inspiration board), then identity development (mark, palette, typography, voice, and the wellness illustration style), then application rules and reusable templates for each surface the hub uses, then the manual is assembled and handed off. The full phase list is in the roadmap below.
Organization Goals
What the space will be
Food Access
A grocery and bodega area stocked through a St. Mary’s Food Bank partnership, with refrigerators and fresh and non-perishable food available like a neighborhood market. The hub actively accepts community donations of spices and seasonings so students can actually make meals from what they take home, not just collect ingredients they can’t use.
Social Services
the college’s social worker and AmeriCorps-funded social work interns will have dedicated office space within the building, with an intentionally open, integrated layout that encourages informal interaction alongside formal one-on-one appointments. The sitting area adjacent to the offices is a quiet waiting space designed for students meeting with staff, not a general hangout area.
Community Resources
A shared community resource space will host partner organizations offering ACCESS and SNAP enrollment, counseling referrals, and other social services. A Dress for Success clothing closet provides free professional and workforce attire for students preparing for interviews and careers. A conference room is available for Career Services presentations, workshops from outside agencies, and meetings with community partners.
Kids Corner
A dedicated kids play area where children can play while their parent receives services, meets with a social worker, or accesses resources. The Kids Corner should be painted with kid-friendly elements drawn from the hub’s brand identity. This is essential for student parents who would otherwise skip services because they have no childcare.
The Hangout Space
Located near the coffee area and food pantry, this is the social heart of the hub. A lounge and cafe area with free coffee, microwaves, and comfortable seating where students can eat, relax, study, and connect. A monitor in the hangout space shows a rotation of cooking demonstration videos (filmed in the nutrition area kitchens) and a daily schedule of what’s happening at the hub: Career Services workshops, community partner visits, cooking demos, and other activities students might want to join. This is where the energy is. The quiet waiting area near the offices is separate and intentionally calm.
Cooking Demonstrations
Live cooking demos happen in the nutrition area where there are kitchens for hands-on instruction. Budget meal planning, recipes using pantry staples and donated spices, and basic cooking skills for students who may have never cooked for themselves. Demos are recorded and played on the hangout space monitor so students who missed them can still learn.
Farmers Market
Campus Cares hosts a free outdoor farmers market once a month. Fresh produce, community vendors, and a gathering event that brings students out of classrooms and into the space in a low-pressure social context. Some markets now include free haircuts, a high-value, high-visibility service that generates real foot traffic and word of mouth. The brand system needs to extend outdoors: signage, banners, social media promotion, and event graphics for the market are part of the scope.
The central design challenge: The space must feel truly inviting and community-oriented, not clinical or charity-coded. The goal is for students to want to come here, not feel like they have to.
Audience
Who we are designing for
the college is a federally designated Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI). The HSI designation requires at least 25% Hispanic undergraduate enrollment and qualifies the institution for federal Title V funding. the college has an active Office of Hispanic-Serving Initiatives and has received Adelante the college Title V grants to support Latino/a student success. This designation matters for the hub because it shapes the cultural context of everything from signage language to food offerings to the bilingual needs of the space.
Students are also navigating housing, transportation, childcare, and financial instability.
Design decisions, from color choices to signage language to layout, should reflect and respect this community’s dignity, resilience, and diversity.
Design Voice
Tone and visual language
Friendly, warm, energetic, and community-centered. The visual language should feel hand-crafted and human rather than institutional. Think Trader Joe’s: bright colors, hand-drawn or illustrated elements, chalkboard-style signage, a neighborhood market aesthetic that makes people feel like regulars rather than recipients.
The color palette should feel calming and grounded while still being warm and inviting.
Language should be welcoming and first-person (“Come on in,” “Help yourself,” “We’re here”) rather than procedural or bureaucratic. The social workers are neighbors, not case managers. Everyone is welcome. There is no shame here.
Design Scope
What gets designed
A complete brand system documented in an online brand guide, covering:
1. Print
Brochures, flyers, menus, event posters, informational handouts.
2. Digital + Screen
Website, social media, GauchoTV graphics, video lower thirds, animations.
3. Interior Signage
Zone identification: Bodega, Coffee + Hangout, Community Connection, Kids Corner, Conference Room, Laundry, Dress for Success, Campus Cares.
4. Environmental Graphics + Murals
Wall murals and large-format imagery around themes of food, community, wellness, and belonging. Murals will be conceptualized as part of the brand development process and executed by the college student artists. See Mural section below for team and context.
5. Outdoor + Event Graphics
Banners, signage, and promotional materials for the monthly outdoor farmers market. The brand needs to work outside as well as inside, in sunlight, at a distance, on a table banner or a pop-up tent. Social media event graphics for market promotion are part of this scope.
Murals
Student-designed, student-painted
Murals are a central element of the Basic Needs Hub environmental design, not an afterthought. They carry the brand into the physical space in a way that printed vinyl and signage cannot: they are permanent, human-made, and belong to the community that created them.
the college’s mural track record
This project builds on real institutional expertise. the college has completed large-scale mural installations on campus, including a 95-foot mural at the pool and the Art Building mural designed and painted by Art Club members, demonstrating the collaborative student-artist model that will carry forward here. Both projects are precedent for what a student team can accomplish at scale.
Who paints it
Mural execution will be led by either the Art Club (who have painted large-scale murals on campus) or the college Design Studio students, depending on availability, timeline, and the nature of the specific zones. The two groups can also collaborate, design students develop the concepts and brand system, Art Club handles the physical painting.
Environmental graphics vs. murals
These are related but distinct categories within the design scope:
Environmental graphics is the broader category, it includes everything from zone signage to wayfinding arrows to large-format printed vinyl. It can be produced and installed relatively quickly and changed over time.
Murals are a subset of environmental graphics that are hand-painted directly on walls. They are permanent, high-impact, and community-built. For Basic Needs Hub, murals are planned for high-visibility zones, most likely the Bodega wall (oversized fruit imagery) and the main entry or lounge area (welcoming, community-themed imagery).
The brand system developed in the earlier identity phases will directly inform mural design. Students should not begin painting until the overall visual language, palette, illustration style, typography, has been established and approved.
Brand Identity
An illustration library as the visual system
Rather than a single logo or mascot, the Basic Needs Hub brand should be built around a library of wellness illustrations that work across every touchpoint. These illustrations become the visual language of the space: warm, calming, diverse, and human. They show up on wall murals, signage, social media, printed materials, and digital screens.
What the illustration library covers
Healthy food and cooking, community connection, studying and learning, self-care and wellness, families and children, nature and calm. The illustrations should reflect the diversity of the college’s student population and feel aspirational without being preachy. The Kids Corner gets its own kid-friendly subset of the illustration library, painted directly on the walls.
How the library is used
Zone navigation on wall maps. Welcome messaging on digital displays at entry. Social media content (“New meal planning workshop Thursday”). Printed materials like flyers and event posters. The library approach means the brand stays fresh because new illustrations can be added over time without redesigning the whole system.
Design requirements
Illustrations must work at small scale (social media avatar) and at large scale (wall mural). Consistent style, limited color palette from the brand system, clear and simple forms. The style guide should include templates so student designers can create new illustrations that match the established look.
Design Phases
Project roadmap
These phases build toward a documented, applicable brand. The template-production and environmental-application phases begin here but carry into a second grant year if one is awarded.
- Name the hub Develop and test name options with the client and the social worker, then lock a name students will say out loud, the way Amarillo College calls theirs “the ARC.” This comes first because the identity cannot be designed until the hub is named.
- Research Gather inspiration imagery, visit the space, talk to students about what they want it to feel like. Build a Pinterest inspiration board as the first visual deliverable.
- Brand Foundation Develop color palette, typography, and overall look and feel. Present direction options for review.
- Brand Application Apply the brand to a handful of print and digital pieces. Test how it works across contexts. Narrow down the visual voice.
- Asset Development Build out the wellness illustration library: iconography, illustration style, photography direction, video style guide.
- Environmental Graphics + Mural Concepts Identify signage locations and wall art placement with the social worker. Design for the space. Develop mural concepts for Art Club / Design Studio execution.
- Brand Guide Finalization Document everything so anyone can use it correctly.
- Template Production Build ready-to-use templates for print, social media, and web, in Canva with locked brand colors, approved fonts, and pre-built layouts, so the social work team can produce materials independently. The brand guide includes a Canva setup guide.
- Environmental Application Final artwork for physical spaces as renovation phases are completed. Mural painting in coordination with Art Club and/or Design Studio.
Visual Inspiration
The inspiration board
Visual inspiration for this project lives in a Pinterest inspiration board the student designer builds early on, in the research phase, rather than a link list here. She pulls campus care-hub examples, market and signage references, illustration styles, and color moods into that board and shares it with the team for review. The board grows as the identity develops and becomes part of the research record.
Future Exploration
Optional technology ideas
This section is not a deliverable. The brand system, murals, and environmental graphics are the work. What follows is a horizon scan, ideas worth having in the room when conversations about the space mature, and a record of how AI was actually used in this project.
How AI contributed to this brief: This document was researched and written with AI assistance, synthesizing precedent spaces, developing the brand framework, drafting the design voice, and structuring the phased approach. That’s a legitimate and meaningful use of the technology: not as a gimmick layered onto the physical space, but as a tool that accelerated professional-quality thinking. For a community project with no budget and a tight timeline, that matters.
Resource Navigator / Triage Tool
A stigma-aware AI assistant, accessible via a kiosk, a QR code on the wall, or a web app, that helps students figure out what they qualify for and where to go. Rather than asking “are you food insecure?” it uses presumptive framing: “Here are things many the college students use. Which of these sounds helpful?” No forms, no intake interviews, no judgment. The student gets a short list of relevant resources and a clear next step.
CopaMigo is in pilot as a student-built, stigma-aware triage and routing tool. The Basic Needs Hub is a natural physical home for it, either as a kiosk near the entrance or as a QR-linked web app on the wall.
Recipe App: Cook What You Have
An AI-powered recipe tool where students tell it what food they have in their pantry and it suggests meals they can actually make with those ingredients. Simple instructions, budget-friendly, nutrition-conscious. Could run on a kiosk next to the food area, on the library interactive screen, or as a take-home QR code. This is a real product with real users and a constrained, meaningful problem, which makes it ideal as a student-built project.
Benefits Enrollment Assistant
SNAP, ACCESS, FAFSA, emergency aid, the application processes for these are notoriously confusing. An AI assistant that walks students step by step through eligibility and application, in plain language, without jargon. Could supplement the in-person community org presence in the resource zone for students who prefer to start on their own before talking to someone.
Social Media + Content Generation
The social work team will need to produce regular content, event announcements, pantry inventory updates, resource spotlights, without a dedicated marketing person. AI-assisted templates in Canva, combined with a simple prompt system, let non-designers generate on-brand content quickly. Build this into the template-production phase alongside the Canva template handoff.
Ethical design note: Any AI tool in this space must be designed with the same stigma-reduction principles as the physical space. No data collection that feels surveillance-like. No requiring login or student ID for basic resource information. Opt-in, anonymous where possible, and always with a clear path to a real human if preferred.
Library interactive screen
The new interactive screen in the college library is an opportunity to extend the hub’s presence beyond the physical building. It could serve as a CopaMigo access point, display the pantry inventory board, or rotate wellness content and resource information. This connects the library and the hub as part of the same student support ecosystem, reaching students who may not know the hub exists yet.
Digital pantry inventory board
A screen near the Bodega entrance that shows what’s available this week, updated by staff via a simple Google Sheet or form. Removes the “I don’t know what they have, so I won’t bother going in” barrier. Students can check it before deciding whether to visit. Build it as a Google Sheets-connected display using a Raspberry Pi or a cheap Android tablet.
QR-linked resource cards
Every zone gets a simple printed card with a QR code linking to more information, SNAP enrollment steps, clothing donation guidelines, upcoming cooking class schedule. Low tech, high value. A student with basic web skills can build and maintain the linked pages. Keeps the physical signage clean while making depth of information available to anyone who wants it.
GauchoTV integration
Screens inside the hub connect to GauchoTV content: rotating event announcements, resource spotlights, student stories, cooking demo highlights, and daily activity schedules. The brand system developed in this project should include a GauchoTV template so the hub has a consistent visual presence.
Promotional animations and videos about the hub should also run on GauchoTV screens in the library and student union, reaching students who don’t yet know the hub exists. Short, branded spots showing what the space looks like, what’s available, and how to find it. This is how students who would never search for “basic needs” on a website discover the hub organically.
Additional Notes
Student representation in the illustrations
Have the conversation with the social worker early about what imagery would resonate with the students who use this space. Illustrations designed by a student who has used the food pantry will carry authenticity that no outside consultant can produce. This is exactly the right kind of project for work-study students to own.
Basic Needs Hub Design Brief, a community college Digital Media Arts