The neighborhood behind the market.

Eastern Market on Capitol Hill is one of the best-known open-air markets in DC. The neighborhood around it (the mom-and-pop shops, the dining strip on Pennsylvania Avenue, the residential blocks that hold the place together) gets less attention. Workhorse built the Eastern Market Main Street identity to fix that. A medallion mark composed of the neighborhood itself (the iconic Eastern Market arched window, a market wheel, a tree, a street grid) anchors the system. A tri-fold business guide and map carries it into the hand.

The brief.

Eastern Market Main Street is the DC Main Street program for the blocks around Eastern Market on Capitol Hill: the mom-and-pop shops, the dining strip on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the residential streets that hold the place together. The market itself already had a brand of its own: the building, the awnings, the producers who set up outside it. Eastern Market Main Street, the DC Main Street program covering the surrounding blocks, needed to read as kin without competing for the same attention. So instead of setting the program name in type and calling it a logo, we built the mark out of the neighborhood itself, the arched window and a market wheel and a tree and a street grid, and it ended up reading as a stamp, a compass, and a tiny piece of cartography all at once.

01Identity

Design System

Three colors, everywhere the program goes.

Charcoal, cream, and coral run the whole system, from the printed map through the pins and totes and cups.

01System

Color

Market Coral

Primary accent, category dots, presentation ground

#F37A6C

Cream Paper

Map ground, tote canvas

#F5F0E8

Block Charcoal

Brochure panels, medallion line work, body type

#1A1A1A

Sage Block

Green space on the neighborhood map

#D5E0CA

Capitol White

Reverse marks on charcoal

#FFFFFF

Marks

Embroidered mark · Shield medallion with the full mark, stitched

Medallion pin · Circular badge cut, reverse on black

EMMS monogram · Compact monogram over the street-grid pattern

02Map

The business guide and map.

Charcoal panels frame a cream map indexed by red category dots (Local Business, Outdoor Eastern Market, Dining, Shopping & Services), with the full business directory set beside it, and the whole thing tri-folds down to something that fits a coat pocket. Every mom-and-pop listed on it is the reason the program exists, and the map is how a visitor finds them.

Close-up of the neighborhood map artwork: cream ground, red category dots, business listings

Tri-fold business guide open, charcoal panels with the medallion

The neighborhood behind the market.

03Merch

Patches, pins, cups and totes.

A neighborhood brand earns its keep on the things people carry. The medallion went onto cream canvas totes, embroidered patches, enamel pins, and coffee cups, and a line-art illustration set (the market facade, the Metro, the row houses) gave the newsletter its own voice in the same drawing style.