The Brief
YIMBYtown started as a scrappy annual meetup in Boulder, CO, in 2016, when a handful of pro-housing advocates began comparing notes on what was working and what wasn’t in their own cities. A decade later, it’s grown into the country’s largest pro-housing conference, drawing more than 1,000 advocates, urban planners, elected officials, academics, engineers, and developers for three days of panels, workshops, and movement-building. Every year, the conference moves to a new city, and every year a new local host builds the visual identity from scratch. That approach kept each conference feeling place-rooted and organizer-owned, but it also meant no consistent foundation carried through as the movement scaled. When YIMBYtown announced its move to Raleigh for 2026, host CITYBUILDER and its collaborating partners needed a brand system built to match the size and seriousness the movement had grown into, without losing the handmade, grassroots energy that made it resonate in the first place.
The Work
MRC built YIMBYtown 2026 a brand identity system from the ground up, logo, typography, illustration style, and color palette, all created new since the existing markers were neutral placeholders with nothing worth keeping. The direction leaned into a set of clear contrasts pulled straight from the brand strategy: current, not out of fashion. Playful, not childish. Bold and vibrant, not muted. Handcrafted, not rigid. Custom illustrations of townhomes, bicycles, street signs, and an oak tree bench brought Raleigh’s own texture into a visual language built to travel, capturing the diversity of housing types and the everyday scenes of a growing city without pinning the whole identity to just one place.
The system had to work as hard as the movement it represents: welcoming to first-time volunteers and career policy staffers alike, energetic enough for a room of 1,000 advocates, and flexible enough to stretch across social media, print, signage, merch, and a full conference website.
Bringing It Online
MRC designed and developed the conference website at yimby.town, carrying the new identity into ticketing, sponsor pages, the speaker application, and a growing archive of past conferences. When the host team began building out additional pages on their own, they found that translating a brand system into new, functioning web pages takes a specialized hand, so they brought MRC back in to design custom illustrated icons for the sponsor, ticket, speaker, and transportation pages, each one built to extend the same visual language rather than reach for stock art. MRC continues on as YIMBYtown’s creative partner, extending the identity into merchandise and campaign assets as the conference approaches.
Hosted by CITYBUILDER, in collaboration with RaleighForward, WakeUP Wake County, Yes! in my Triangle, NC Housing Table, and Southern Urbanism.
