Report Design
Sound Transit Strategic Development Report
Client
Sound Transit (via Hatch)
Industry
Government Agency
My Role
Lead Designer
Location
United States of America
The Project
Sound Transit needed a comprehensive report on the development of surplus lands surrounding a new underground light rail station.
The report combined real estate strategy, financial analysis, and a triple-bottom-line framework assessing economic, social, and environmental outcomes. It needed to serve a wide range of readers, from technical specialists and agency stakeholders to general community members with no background in transit-oriented development.
The design challenge was to create a public-facing document that could hold complex analysis without becoming dense, fragmented, or overly technical.
The Thinking
The core design problem was making multi-layered analysis legible for readers with very different levels of technical knowledge.
I developed a colour-led visual system to connect project stages, development scenarios, and key evaluation categories across the report. This gave readers a consistent visual thread to follow, whether they were reading the full document or moving directly to the sections most relevant to them.
Inconsistent source photography created a separate quality challenge. Rather than allowing lower-resolution or mismatched images to weaken the document’s professional standard, I used strategic colour overlays to bring the photography into a more cohesive visual system. This maintained a consistent aesthetic while preserving the value of site-specific imagery.
Custom icons and infographics translated financial, social, and environmental data into clearer visual forms. The goal was to reduce the reading burden for non-specialist audiences while preserving enough detail and structure for technical readers to trust the content.
What This Demonstrates
