Greater New Haven’s Regional Growth Partnership asked Granite Bay Design to develop a brochure highlighting the area’s many opportunities for businesses, education and consumers. The brochure features some photographs supplied by the client, supplemented with several stock photographs. There was not a lot of text, so we made sure the images were impactful. Most pages feature at least one large photo that fades into the text.

The following text is from the Regional Growth Partnership Brochure

Regional Vision Statement

The South Central Connecticut Region of 2028 will pride itself on being a global center of innovation with successful businesses, a competitive, welcoming and business-friendly environment, and an excellent standard of living for all. Its residents will constitute a high quality, adaptable and productive workforce.

Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy

The 2008 Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy (CEDS) is a five-year action plan for the entire South Central Connecticut region. It was developed by a broad group of business and civic leaders, public officials and private citizens as an effort to address the region’s most pressing economic challenges and to create an environment in which our region’s people and businesses will flourish.

We do this as a region because we share so much in common. We all use the same roads, buses and trains. We all rely on the same hospitals, shop in the same stores and enjoy the same theaters. In short, our economy is a regional economy, and whether we live in a small town or a big city, all 570,000 people in the region have a stake in seeing our economy prosper.

This booklet presents the highlights of the 2008 CEDS, including key facts about the region’s economy and a summary of the Regional Action Agenda—a set of concrete proposals for addressing our region’s needs. The full text of the CEDS can be found at www.rgp-ct.org.

Creating the changes outlined in this CEDS will be a team effort drawing on the exceptional talent and organizational resources of our region. Businesses, government, non-profits and private citizens will all need to take a leading role in implementing this CEDS in order to meet the challenges that we face. Everybody is invited to join this effort.

Regional Vision Statement

The South Central Connecticut Region of 2028 will pride itself on being a global center of innovation with successful businesses, a competitive, welcoming and business-friendly environment, and an excellent standard of living for all. Its residents will constitute a high quality, adaptable and productive workforce.

To realize the region’s collective vision, the 2008 CEDS proposes a Regional Action Agenda that will focus the region’s economic development efforts on five key areas:

• Regional Marketing & Communication<
• Transportation
• Business Development
• Workforce & Housing
• Land Use Planning, Policies & Regulation

The following pages outline the specific programmatic and policy initiatives proposed to help meet the region’s needs in these areas. Each objective is a concrete, actionable strategy that engages regional partners from the public, private and non-profit sectors in addressing these critical issues. Because these goals are all interrelated, many of the initiatives are closely linked. Extensive details for each objective can be found in the full CEDS online at www.rgp-ct.org.

Regional Marketing and Communications

Enhance the region’s image as a desirable location in which to start, locate and operate a business through an aggressive, cooperative external and internal marketing program and creation of a credible regional economic development team.

In a globalizing economy, businesses looking for a new location seek strong regions. They realize that the success of their enterprise will depend on the combination of talent, infrastructure and costs associated with the entire region in which they locate. Only after they have identified strong regions do they consider individual municipalities or sites. Therefore, it is crucial for the region to market itself as a whole to show off its collective strengths and assets.

The South Central region has never run a sustained regional marketing program, but there is strong support from both the public and private sectors to develop an effective strategy. This marketing strategy will include both external marketing towards business prospects outside the region, and internal marketing to reach existing businesses, stakeholders and allies within South Central Connecticut.