Creative Repute partnered with Creative Philadelphia to build the brand, web, and marketing infrastructure behind Healing Verse Germantown: The Streets Are Talking, a Bloomberg Philanthropies-funded poetry and public art project rooted in community healing and storytelling in Germantown, Philadelphia.
About the Project
Healing Verse Germantown grew out of a conviction that poetry can give shape to grief and turn it into something a neighborhood could hold onto together. The project invited Germantown residents into a series of community poetry workshops, offering a safe and creative space to process their experiences through poetry. From those workshops and a 24-hour community poetry phone line, 19 poems were selected and transformed into public art by local visual artists, installed at meaningful sites throughout Germantown. The public art trail launched in April 2026 and remained on view through June 2026.
The installations take a wide range of forms: stained glass bus shelters, brass letters inlaid in pavement, a traveling SEPTA bus wrap, augmented reality, a community fridge, hand-sewn banners, t-shirts, custom shoes, flower arrangements with ceramic vases, and a poem card distributed to nearly 7,000 Philadelphia first responders. The project is as much about how and where art can live in a community as it is about the poetry itself.
When the project launched, it had an existing templated WordPress website provided through the Bloomberg Philanthropies infrastructure. Creative Philadelphia engaged Creative Repute to take that foundation and build it into something that truly reflected the depth, artistry, and community focus of the project, alongside developing the full brand and marketing system to support the exhibition’s public launch.
About Creative Philadelphia
Creative Philadelphia is the City of Philadelphia’s municipal office dedicated to making arts and culture a central part of civic life. Operating out of the Office of the Mayor, Creative Philadelphia supports artists, cultural organizations, and community-driven creative projects across the city’s neighborhoods, with a focus on expanding access, building economic opportunity for creatives, and using arts and culture as a vehicle for community well-being and positive social change.
The office has roots going back to 1984 and has evolved significantly over four decades of city leadership. As of 2024, under Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration, it operates under the name Creative Philadelphia, reflecting a renewed commitment to placing creativity at the center of how the city serves its residents.
Our Approach
Our work touched several interconnected areas, each of which required close coordination with the Creative Philadelphia project team and a range of specialists across design, development, strategy, and community outreach.
The engagement began with research into the project’s community context and goals, including a detailed look at the Germantown audience specifically. Germantown is a neighborhood with a rich and layered history and a highly diverse population. The audience strategy that shaped the work went beyond general design best practices: it considered how to speak authentically to residents who might be engaging with the materials out of grief, curiosity, or a desire to participate, and how to make the experience feel welcoming and reflective of the real people at the heart of the project. This meant prioritizing authentic community imagery with proper photo captions crediting the people featured and a content tone that centered human stories alongside program information.
On the brand and design side, CR’s designers worked within the project’s established visual identity, applying its color palette of deep purple, warm orange, soft lavender, and yellow across every deliverable. Working in Adobe Illustrator, the team translated the brand’s visual language into a full suite of marketing materials. A yellow iris flower, a silhouette of a face in profile, and birds on a wire became recurring illustrative elements across collateral, grounding each piece in the community and the poetry at the heart of the project. A sneaker icon was developed as part of the custom map icon set, a direct nod to one of the exhibition’s most personal installations in which custom shoes were distributed to community members. Social media templates were also produced to give the project team a consistent, on-brand toolkit for their channels throughout the exhibition period.
From that foundation, the team produced a full suite of graphic design collateral: event flyers and invitations, project advertisements, A-frames, and a mailer and postcard announcing the exhibition in Germantown, alongside data infographics built from community survey results.
A comprehensive website audit was produced early in the process, examining the existing templated site for opportunities across SEO, UX, UI, accessibility, visual design, and navigation. That audit informed the site build and shaped the overall strategy. One of its central findings was that the website needed to serve two distinct purposes: as an active, action-oriented resource for community members during the life of the project, and as an archival resource that would remain useful and accessible long after the exhibition closed.
On the SEO and content side, the team implemented title tags and meta descriptions across pages, optimized header structure, added descriptive alt text to images, and developed keyword strategy around terms meaningful to the Germantown community and the broader project goals. Google Analytics and Search Console were integrated to support ongoing performance tracking.
The website was designed, built, and maintained on WordPress, with full security setup and weekly auto-backups implemented from the start. An
interactive digital map of all installation locations was integrated into the site. Rather than relying on a standard mapping plugin, the design and development teams collaborated to build a fully custom map experience that reflected the artistic nature of the project. Designers created the visual concept and produced a set of custom icons, each representing a different type of installation, which were then translated by the developer into the site’s backend. Where a generic map would use a standard location pin for every point, the Healing Verse Germantown map uses icons specific to each artwork: a projector for a projection installation, a thumbtack for the poster series, a community fridge, a SEPTA bus for the traveling installation, and so on. The result is a map that functions as part of the artistic experience.
The audio from the project’s 24-hour poetry phone line was embedded directly into the site, connecting visitors to the community voices at the heart of the work. A staff-facing tutorial was produced so the client team could manage and update content independently, and at the close of the engagement the site was transferred to the client’s hosting platform.
Throughout, Creative Repute managed a distributed team of contractors across project management, brand strategy, graphic design, and web development, coordinating across multiple stakeholders to deliver a cohesive body of work in service of the exhibition’s spring 2026 launch.
The Outcome
Healing Verse Germantown: The Streets Are Talking launched publicly in April 2026, with a celebration that marked the opening of the public art trail and the start of a series of free walking tours throughout May 2026.
The project website serves as the central hub for the exhibition, giving visitors access to the interactive installation map, poetry phone line audio, workshop and artist information, a community resource guide, and a full events calendar. It was built to serve the community now and to remain a meaningful record of the project for years to come. Every piece of the brand and marketing system Creative Repute built supports the overarching goal of making it as easy as possible for Germantown residents and Philadelphians citywide to find, experience, and connect with the work.
This project represents the full range of what Creative Repute does – brand strategy, graphic design, web development, marketing collateral, and project coordination – in service of work that is deeply rooted in community healing and public life in Philadelphia.
Scalability and Future Potential
One of the distinguishing features of this engagement was that the work was designed to last well beyond the project’s run. From the beginning, the team approached every deliverable with an eye toward what the client would need once Creative Repute’s active involvement ended.
The graphic design collateral produced for this project also contributes to its long-term value. The flyers, infographics, A-frames, and social media templates CR developed serve as a practical reference for how the brand system translates across print, digital, and event contexts. If Creative Philadelphia revisits this project or builds on it in the future, that body of work provides a ready set of templates and visual precedents to draw from without starting from scratch.
The website was built on WordPress with a CMS structure that allows the Creative Philadelphia team to update content, add blog posts, and manage program partners without developer support. The staff-facing tutorial delivered at the close of the engagement ensures that institutional knowledge about how the site works doesn’t walk out the door with the agency.
The archival intent built into the site’s architecture means that the Healing Verse Germantown digital presence doesn’t simply go dark after the exhibition closes. The poetry, the artists, the installation documentation, and the community resource guide remain online as a living record, one that researchers, educators, community organizations, and future grant applicants can point to as evidence of the project’s scope and impact.
For grant-funded public art projects specifically, this kind of long-term thinking is crucial. Creative Repute approached this engagement with the understanding that a project funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies carries an expectation of documentation, accountability, and legacy, and built accordingly.
Why Grant-Funded Projects Benefit from a Dedicated Creative Partner
Managing a grant-funded initiative comes with a distinct set of pressures: fixed budgets, reporting requirements, multiple stakeholders, and a timeline that doesn’t move. Having a creative partner who understands that environment from the start makes a measurable difference in what gets delivered and how smoothly it gets there.
- Scope is managed from day one. A dedicated creative partner builds the full picture of deliverables upfront, so nothing gets added informally mid-project and budget stays where it belongs.
- The brand and materials reflect the weight of the work. Community-centered initiatives deserve creative that matches their mission. A dedicated partner ensures the visual identity, marketing collateral, and digital presence are built to represent the project with the seriousness it deserves.
- The deliverables outlast the grant period. A well-built website, an archived brand system, and documented processes give the organization something to build on long after the funding cycle ends.
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