There are not many design briefs where the same document needs to feel like a place of grief and a public park invitation simultaneously.
The Macarthur Memorial Park Plan of Management is both: a statutory instrument governing the operation of a new 300-acre multidenominational cemetery in Sydney's south-west, and a vision document for one of the region's most significant new community landscapes.
Working from client's brand guideline, the design challenge was to build a full document system: one that could carry dense statutory content, complex data visualisations, and landscape photography within a single coherent visual language.
That tension – between weight and warmth, between compliance and invitation – shaped every design decision across the document.
The underlying design brief:
Every design element sits inside a document
about mortality, remembrance, and community grief. The task was to hold the content with care
and respect, while still producing a document that communicates the park's vision as a living, open, welcoming place. That balance itself is the work.
Unresolved sketches to functional diagrams:
Figure 21 arrived as an unresolved sketch. The team knew what the financial framework meant but not how to show it. The proposed solution – a proportional revenue and expenses diagram with arrow-weight system across three operational phases – was built from the brief up, translating an abstract funding model into something readable at a glance.
Chapter 7:
Strategy and Plan
Four strategic directions, each needing to stand alone but none designed to operate in isolation. Colour does the navigational work: each direction is assigned a distinct colour from the brand palette, introduced boldly on the typographic opener and carried consistently through to icons and accents within that direction's section.
Within each strategic direction, tinted colour panels and white backgrounds create a deliberate content hierarchy. The key performance areas sit within a coloured panel – the priority read. Guidelines and actions sit on white, the supporting detail. The contrast is quiet but intentional, giving a content-heavy chapter genuine breathing room without breaking the visual system.
The meeting point:
The interlocking circles diagram on page 69 was an original concept: four coloured arcs overlapping to make the document's own argument visible – that none of the directions operates independently. The circular form was a conscious echo of the brand's existing visual motif, grounding the diagram inside the identity rather than alongside it.
