Destination by Design partnered with the Hickory Metro CVB to reimagine a Visit Hickory brand. We crafted a bold new visual identity and cohesive messaging that feels fresh and welcoming—one that captures the city’s creative spirit and invites visitors to discover the vibrant, unexpected side of Hickory.
Brand Messaging & Visual Identity
DbD created a full visual identity for Visit Hickory—including a new logo, typography, color palette, and practical templates like letterhead designs and digital mockups. Our team also developed brand messaging to highlight the city’s unique assets and tell a more compelling story, along with original photography that captures Hickory’s character and charm.
Community Engagement
The new Visit Hickory brand was shaped by the people who live and work there. Through stakeholder meetings, community surveys, and feedback sessions, DbD gathered insights that informed everything from messaging tone to logo direction.
This collaborative approach ensured that the final brand didn’t just look good—it felt right.
Beer Can Label Design & Production
To celebrate the launch of the new Visit Hickory brand, DbD partnered with City Walk Brewery & Distillery, a local downtown favorite, to produce a beer can featuring the fresh visual identity. The custom design showcased the brand’s bold visuals in a fun, tangible format–putting Hickory’s creative energy right into people’s hands.
Destination by Design partnered with the Hickory Metro Convention Center & Visitors Bureau to reimagine the Visit Hickory brand, giving the city a bold new visual identity and messaging built to feel fresh, welcoming, and true to its creative spirit. The new “Oh Hey!” brand captures the vibrant, unexpected side of a city long known for furniture manufacturing and technology, from its breweries and biking trails to its music events. The identity extended across everything from letterhead and street banners to apparel and a custom beer can produced with City Walk Brewery & Distillery.
In North Carolina, community branding and destination marketing often work together to help a city tell a more complete story to visitors. For Hickory, that meant developing a full visual identity, including a new logo, typography, color palette, and original photography, then extending that brand into tangible marketing moments like a co-branded beer can launch that put the new identity directly into people’s hands.
A city’s brand shapes how outsiders see it and how residents feel about the place they call home. Hickory’s rebrand was built on stakeholder meetings, community surveys, and feedback sessions that gathered input directly from the people who live and work there, ensuring the final identity reflected the city’s creative energy rather than a generic outsider’s take. That kind of grounded, community-informed branding helps a destination attract visitor spending while reinforcing local pride.
Community branding is the process of developing a visual identity and messaging strategy that captures a place’s unique character and communicates it to visitors and residents alike. It typically includes brand strategy, logo and visual identity design, and public engagement to ensure the final brand reflects real community input. For Hickory, that process produced a new logo, color palette, photography style, and messaging framework built around the city’s creative, unexpected charm.
Hickory sits in the foothills of western North Carolina, long recognized as a hub for furniture manufacturing and technology. Beyond its industrial roots, the city has quietly built a strong lineup of breweries, biking trails, and music events that locals have known about for years, and the new Visit Hickory brand was designed specifically to bring that side of the city into the spotlight for visitors.
