Projects
Code:You — Statewide Rebrand & Brand System
In 2015, Code Louisville launched as a nonprofit workforce development program teaching Kentuckians to code. By 2021, the Commonwealth of Kentucky wanted to replicate the program statewide as Code Kentucky — same curriculum, same mentors, same model. The result was dual-branded everything: two websites, two brands, fragmented student experience, and an operational burden that grew with every cohort.
During a leadership brainstorm, I proposed a name that could hold everything: Code:You. The previous brands tied the program to one city or one state. Code:You centers on the only thing that never changes — the student. The name scales to any geography, any future program. And the colon does double duty: it reads as both programming syntax and a personal address — code: you.
Working with a non-profit budget meant the agency produced one direction — a techno-brutalist treatment that was technically clean but felt cold for a program designed to help real people change careers. The one thing worth keeping was buried in their exploration: the sideways C:Y mark. Read sideways, the letters become a face. The C is a smile, the colon becomes a pair of eyes, the Y is a punk hairdo. It's immediately friendly without being childish. That mark became the kernel; everything else got rebuilt around it — lockup, color, typography, sub-brand system, and the rules for how it all fit together.
And for anyone who looks closely: the logo winks. On the live site, watch it on the homepage for about twenty seconds.
With a unified brand came the chance to fix what had been broken for students from the start: the application experience. Previously, a prospective student had to know which program they were applying for before they could even begin — Code Louisville or Code Kentucky? JavaScript or UX? Most students didn't know, and that friction was turning people away. The new code-you.org consolidated everything: a single application flow that routes students to the right program on the backend (invisible to the applicant), eligibility checks that automatically surface support like free laptops and stipends, and one resource hub instead of two scattered ones.
I also helped form a small internal marketing team and rebuilt the organization's social media presence from a dormant baseline, focusing on consistency and authenticity over volume.
