This story is part of Worthington Pulse's coverage of the March 9 City Council meeting. Start with the March 9 meeting recap.
The stretch of Worthington that city documents have called "the Northeast Area" has a new name. Members of the Worthington Community Improvement Corporation (CIC) told City Council on March 9 that the corridor will be marketed as Forge Fields at Rush Run, and showed the logo and color palette meant to sell it to developers, employers and future tenants.
"That's right, no more Northeast area", Assistant City Manager David McCorkle said when Council President Rachael Dorothy asked whether the new name replaces the old one. The planning document itself keeps its name, the Northeast Area Plan, but the district now has a brand.
Where the name came from
The corridor is the city's traditional industrial area along Proprietors Road, Huntley Road, Worthington-Galena Road and Schrock Road. Council adopted the Northeast Area Plan for it on July 15, 2024, after a study that began in 2023 and a round of community input. McCorkle said the first recommendation to come out of that study was to brand and market the corridor. According to the staff memo in the agenda packet, three of the plan's nine recommendations deal with marketing or branding, and the naming work started in the fall of 2025.
CIC board member Aaron Brown explained what each part of the name stands for. From the video at 5:57.
A CIC subcommittee did the work: board members Ed Hofmann and Aaron Brown, CIC Chair Scott Green, Council President Pro Tem Rebecca Hermann (who also serves on the CIC board), McCorkle, and Communications Director Anne Brown. The group used two consultants: SketchBlue for naming, then Shout Out Studio for brand strategy.
Aaron Brown said the team anchored the search in six core tenets for the area (the presentation slide listed them as eco, innovation, energetic, access, business and community) and avoided narrowing the name to any one of them, so the brand could scale as development comes.
He explained each piece of the name. "Forge" nods to the area's industrial heritage and to moving forward. "Fields" signals a large area of land, and leaves room for parts of the district to take on their own identities as businesses arrive, such as a retail field or an innovation field. "At Rush Run" ties the district to the creek that runs through it, and, he said, opens the door to a sustainability angle depending on what the city eventually does with the stream.
The team left "Worthington" out of the name on purpose. "Let's let the area stand on its own and Worthington's gonna ride those coattails for it", Brown said. The target audiences are what the presentation called opportunity seekers, the workforce and the community. Opportunity seekers, Brown said, "need to see potential infrastructure and a vision worth betting on".
The strike and the spark
Hofmann, who also sits on the city's Architectural Review Board and Municipal Planning Commission, walked council through the visual identity. The mark is called "the strike and the spark": someone swinging a hammer and making something, and the spark that flies off, "a flash about the future". He said it can also read as Rush Run or as a star.
CIC board member Ed Hofmann presented the mark, which the team calls the strike and the spark.
The wordmark is custom lettering with a vintage feel meant to echo Worthington's look without saying Worthington. The palette picks up the city's blue and, in answer to a council member's question, the gold-orange Worthington already uses. A red was chosen as a complementary color. The colors are deliberately loose. Hofmann said years of color debates on the Architectural Review Board taught him that a broad palette "will probably save a lot of heartache down the road". Formal brand guidelines are still to come.
Mock-ups showed the mark on street banners and merchandise, possibly paired with an "established" date. Hofmann said the group has not decided whether that date would be 2026, when the district was named, or 1803, Worthington's founding.
The idea, he said, is to give businesses something to build on rather than a finished look: "We definitely wanna give enough seedlings that things will sprout, but we don't wanna make the whole garden all at once".
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Rush Run as an amenity
Several council members asked about the creek. One asked whether a developer outside the area would recognize the name Rush Run. McCorkle said people in the corridor would, which the council member took to mean the city is building a new identity around it.
Hofmann acknowledged that the stretch of Rush Run in the district "is a little troubled right now", and said the hope is that developers will be asked to improve their portion of the creek, the way the city asks for sidewalks or brick paving elsewhere. He floated starting with a quarter-mile of boardwalk, signage and lighting to show what the creek could become.
McCorkle said there is $100,000 in the 2026 budget to study infrastructure in the corridor, and Rush Run is part of that study. The creek "has traditionally been kind of an afterthought. It's a drainage ditch in a lot of areas", he said, but the goal is an amenity, such as a multi-use path with benches.
Dorothy noted that Rush Run continues beyond the district, through the Rush Run Nature Preserve, the cemetery and on toward the Olentangy, and said the city will need to stay mindful of neighbors along that path. A council member asked whether Columbus, which Rush Run also touches, might help pay for improvements such as public art. McCorkle said Columbus was a stakeholder in the Northeast Area Plan but has not yet been briefed on the brand.
McCorkle also pointed to Anheuser-Busch, which he said is making a significant investment in its nearby facility. The plant is outside the city but close by, and he said investment anywhere in the area helps Worthington. Aaron Brown said that if large neighbors start using the Forge Fields name, "that's a huge win".
What comes next
McCorkle laid out the rollout:
The CIC's rollout plan: brand assets, a microsite, then signage and wayfinding.
- Brochures and other materials for property owners, developers and nearby employers. Asked whether major employers would get them, McCorkle said yes, as part of a formal launch.
- A microsite of about five pages, linked from the city's business website. McCorkle said the web addresses are already reserved and the site would be live in "six, eight weeks".
- Wayfinding signs in the corridor, shown on the presentation's timeline for 2027. Dorothy asked that the signs include pedestrian wayfinding, not just signs for drivers, and on a shorter timeline than the city's earlier wayfinding effort: "It took like 10 years". City Manager Robyn Stewart said the cost of wayfinding will come up when council takes up the capital improvements program.
McCorkle said interest is already building. Northeast Area Plan outreach turned up property owners looking to assemble multiple parcels, and at an economic development conference two weeks earlier a broker approached him about the area. He said there have been "a couple of really good conversations" about speculative buildings for the tech-flex space the city wants. Asked about the I Am Boundless campus, which is part of the plan area, McCorkle said Boundless will be made aware of the brand.
"When you name it, you are moving towards it", Council Member Maria Ramirez said. Council took no vote; the item was an update.
The Northeast Area Plan, with maps of the corridor, is on the city's Northeast Area Plan page.
This is one of 2 Worthington Pulse stories from the March 9 City Council meeting recap.