East Adams
Rooted in Resilience
East Adams is a neighbourhood revitalisation initiative in Syracuse, New York — focused on affordable housing, thoughtful development, and grassroots leadership, built on the belief that communities thrive when the people who live there help shape what comes next. Working through The Boulevard Collective, our team was brought in to build a digital presence that could hold and tell that story.
The goal was twofold: give community members a central place to access resources and stay informed about the project, while presenting a clear and compelling case to potential partners and investors about what had been accomplished and what was still ahead.
Reconnecting the 15th Ward
The biggest design challenge was the density of information. East Adams carries real history, this was once the 15th Ward, a historically Black neighbourhood that was displaced decades ago —and honouring that while keeping the site navigable required careful curation. We kept the visual "XV" at the centre of the design as a constant reference to that history, and I built it into the preloader to make sure it was the first thing you saw.
I collaborated with Kevin Thompson-Estelle, founder of The Boulevard Collective, who led the branding and illustrations and contributed to the web design, and with Klayton Fadul, who worked on the logo and footer animations. Tying in the client's existing coUrbanize platform also meant users had a seamless path from the main site to deeper community resources.
Reclaiming the Future
As Senior Web Designer and Developer, I led the design and development of the site, ran the web meetings with the client, and managed testing and handoff. This was the largest scope project I had taken on at that point - working through the content complexity, the collaboration, and the client relationship was something I genuinely grew from.
The site gave East Adams a digital home that matched the ambition of the project itself: a place where history and future sit side by side, and where community members can find what they need while partners can see exactly what they'd be joining.
