Catonsville Arts District Artistic Wayfinding

Giving residents the visual reference, language, and tools to imagine the town’s branded wayfinding and signage.

The 2023 Catonsville Arts Vision contains a 5-year implementation plan to realize the vision of Catonsville Arts District becoming “a flourishing arts ecosystem that celebrates its diverse communities’ cultural history and stories.”

One of the short-term actions in that plan is to implement “artistic wayfinding in prominent locations that identify significant history and reinforce the Arts District’s identity,” reinforcing the District’s identity, as well as helping people navigate the area.

Baltimore County Arts Guild (BCAG) commissioned the Neighborhood Design Center to engage the local community in a series of visioning sessions. Early in the engagement planning process, it was determined that the best strategy for gathering community input was to make sure engagements were accessible, interactive, and easy to comprehend.

Making engagement accessible — meeting community members where they’re at.

Instead of soliciting community members to attend in-person presentations, NDC went to where community members congregated and guided participants through a highly-visual and interactive process that helped them visualize artistic wayfinding in the district. We also facilitated a virtual kickoff meeting and hosted an online survey that allowed participants to provide feedback from the comfort of their homes.

The project spanned from July to August 2024, during which four engagement activities were facilitated, reaching a total of 249 community members. These sessions were designed to explore ideas and themes centered around people, places, and events that the Catonsville community believes makes Catonsville special, and wishes to see represented in the future artistic wayfinding installations.

The future: using this roadmap to guide implementation.

We can’t wait to see this signage come to life. A few of our recommendations include: