Community Outreach and Engagement Plan Draft–City of Escondido
You can check out more information on the City’s General Plan update along with links to the Outreach Plan’s English and Spanish PDFs.
As part of the General Plan update, the City of Escondido must also address things like fire hazards and climate adoption. A major update to the City’s General Plan is the Environmental Justice element where the City will engage with the public to garner feedback and provide a transparent planning process for their citizens.
This draft outreach plan is considered a “living document” which means it will be constantly updated as the City processes public feedback and comment.
This entire document was written in a short period of time by Senior Planner Veronica Morones, so I had a total of 1.5 work days to create an engaging report from the plan’s Word document before it was reviewed by the Planning Commission.
This entire document was created in Adobe InDesign CC by me with feedback and support from Senior Planner, Veronica Morones.
Background
The Plan was primarily intended to be distributed digitally first as a PDF on the City’s website with the intention of being printed in small quantities during in-person outreach events. The Senior Planner, Veronica, wanted to the plan to be horizontal for more column space and to break away from the traditional vertical letter-sized reports.
Process
Since we didn’t have much time to get a design together, I kept things simple and basic with either 2 or 3 columns per page and some simple, organic shapes to border the pages. I set these basic layouts as parent pages and cycled through the layouts depending on the information presented on the page.
I set up paragraph styles so I could easily edit any of the text that spanned multiple pages all at once. Since this plan is intended as a “living document” that needed to be constantly updated, setting up layouts and styles beforehand will make it easier to edit later.
Reflection
Given the time constraint, this project actually turned out decently well. In hindsight, some of the information presented in the document could’ve been converted to more visually engaging and concise infographics.
Since this is considered a “living document,” there is potential for future improvements and updates on readability and engagement later, but we probably won’t stray too far from the original design to keep the Community Engagement campaign consistent and recognizable.
