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Social Media

Aug 22
0

Commando Design

By | Design, Social Media | 2 Comments

I admit, I’m having a few withdrawal symptoms from my week in Colorado, working pro bono for Yampa Valley Data Partners. I was one of nine graphic designers selected to attend the inaugural Steamboat Design Camp, held in picturesque Steamboat Springs. Back in Baltimore, there is no pre-work hike traversing waterfalls and taking in gorgeous vistas, no daily breakfasts delivered by fellow generous Yampa Valley Design Guild members, and there’s definitely no trace of black garlic infused scotch for added inspiration. What is left simmering, however, is the inspiration and energy from doing said thing, and a slight transformation of perspective—inside and out. We accomplished what we set out to do (reminding ourselves that sharing stories and trading tips wasn’t going to get the real work done), which was come together from various backgrounds and different parts of the country to collaborate and learn and ultimately deliver an identity system for our selected nonprofit.

Our client was Yampa Valley Data Partners, a regional nonprofit organization of Routt and Moffat counties that provides community information and data to small business owners, developers and other community members. YVDP facilitates discussions and regional forums based on indicator data and issues critical to the community. In layman’s terms, this translates into a lot of charts and graphs, which is a challenge in itself. But Executive Director Kate Nowak’s bigger issue was an outdated logo and lack of consistent branding; something that wasn’t helping raise awareness about the organization or its mission.

On day one we started learning as much as we could about YVDP and jotting down ideas and sketching doodles. By late that evening we were transferring those thoughts to computer comps and adding color palettes and tagline suggestions. (Why we didn’t go with “We have more elk than people,” I’ll never know.) We discussed and critiqued and somehow decided on our top three to present to the client without scratching each other’s eyes out. Kate was overjoyed with our efforts and gave good feedback and asked the right questions in return. We then split into two groups in order to divide and conquer the rest of the materials. The logo team further refined the brand and built out the brand guidelines and stationery, and the publication team developed various collateral pieces and ad templates.

Collectively, we did a lot in five days. It would have been fun to take it further, to go beyond the list of everyday templates and items necessary for running a business, understanding that sometimes those are the most essential and should take priority. The subject matter itself practically begs for a microsite or app to help present such complex information in a user interface designed with the audience in mind. I wanted to do more research; find out why the community didn’t know about YDVP and ask those who did, how they used the information for their respective projects. To find out what marketing channels or media outlets would provide the most bang for the buck. But yeah … it was only five days.

We all came to Camp for various reasons, although one common thread among us was the desire to participate collectively. Many of the other attending designers work alone or have had little experience working with other designers in their community. Collaboration is a controversial theme in many graphic design discussions. In Ellen Lupton’s AIGA article, Why Collaborate?, she comments, “I’d love to collaborate, as long as I can work alone.” Can’t say I don’t share some of her sentiment.

Does collaboration achieve a better design end-product or does it potentially water it down by combining ideas and introduce mediocrity by way of democracy? When design is something so individual and subjective, how is a consensus reached? In other fields, there also might be many ways to solve a problem but the clear solution is the one backed by evidence and which minimizes risk. Collaboration as a concept in design is monumental, but it takes skill to execute it successfully and gain productive insight from it. We can reach higher and do better work when we partner with others if we let down our guard and listen. (And if everyone makes a comparable contribution.)

I’d encourage every designer to try forming an impromptu team and help out a nonprofit or tackle a social issue. See what bubbles up. You’ll walk away learning a lot about yourself in the process.

About Steamboat Design Camp: It’s a camp for designers that want to use their creativity to benefit a Steamboat non-profit organization. Coordinated by the Yampa Valley Design Guild, SDC is an intense collaborative design experience–from initial meetings to energetic brainstorming…design iterations to the final launch party. It is also a chance to get inspired, and see firsthand how the designs you do can bring positive change in the very communities we all work and live in.

Thanks to Todd and Lisa and the rest of the Guild for organizing this inaugural event and I hope that it continues to inspire and encourage social designers from all over in the future.

Aug 15
0

Cool Tees for a Hot Issue

By | Design, Social Media | No Comments

Gotta love the do-good projects that bring graphic designers together and gives something to the masses in return. I was out in Colorado this weekend for Steamboat Design Camp (more on that later) and was feeling the love for these cool, er, hot, t-shirts.

In response to the tragic Waldo Canyon fire in Colorado Springs, a group of designers, marketers and volunteers began Wildfiretees.com in June. Word spread like, sorry guys, wildfire on Twitter and Facebook and t-shirt sales took off.

According to the July 27th press release on their website, Wildfiretees’ sales had reached $527,000 with 100% of profits helping those affected by the summer Colorado forest fires. And they’re still going strong. Half of proceeds are going to the Care and Share Food Bank, and half to the Colorado Red Cross. At $20 a pop, you can also donate one to a firefighter. Sad I missed the now sold out “More Disco, Less Inferno” design.

“It’s hard for our team to imagine that we began this project with a goal of selling, maybe, 200 T-shirts” said Sara DeRose co-creative director of Fixer Creative and co-organizer of the initiative. “To our pleasant surprise, a global community has reached-out to support this cause and as of this morning we have sold roughly 27,000 T-shirts.”

“The effort emerged out of a simple and overpowering desire to support wildfire victims in a way that would exceed any individual checks our group could write.” —Wildfiretees.com

I love the impromptu community that develops over something like this. Similar, larger movements evolved out of reactions to the Katrina and Haiti disasters. Sometimes all we can do as designers is gather together and contribute to the cause after the fact. How can we spark that same urge and excitement more proactively in our own circles?

Aug 08
0

A Bump in the Bike Lane

By | Design, Social Media | 2 Comments

The U.S. has long fallen behind other countries in public transit options and providing alternatives to driving. Small strides are being made in the two-wheeled direction, however, with Alison Cohen’s bike sharing upstart Alta Bicycle Share, based out of (where else?) Portland, Oregon. Alta has launched bike rental operations in Washington, D.C. and Boston, among other cities, and will put 10,000 bikes on the streets of New York this summer.

The setup works like this: borrowers unlock a bike from a docking station scattered throughout the city by inserting a prepaid keycard and return the bike to any other docking station at trip’s end. Annual, monthly, 3-day or a 24-hour subscription can be purchased. After paying for a membership, the first 30 minutes of riding is free, with additional costs incurring after that. Pricing can get a little tricky, though, and can be cost prohibitive for tourists or those without time to wait for a keycard in the mail.

Capital Bikeshare rental station near McPherson Square Metro (WMATA) station, downtown Washington, D.C. Photo: Mariordo Mario Roberto Duran Ortiz (Own work)

I looked for information on strides made towards bike sharing programs in Baltimore and didn’t get very far. In November 2011 there were plans for the city to partner with B-cycle to put 300 bikes on Baltimore streets by fall 2012. Like Alta’s partnership with NYC, B-cycle was to be privately funded and use no public subsidies. (Citibank and MasterCard provided $41 million and $6.5 million dollars to fund the NYC fleet, respectively.) I hope they are still moving forward with this plan as I haven’t seen a fancy bike fleet yet.

While Alta and similar biking initiatives are forward thinking in their attempts to alleviate traffic congestion and promote a greener transportation option, too often these types of initiatives ostracize those who most likely do not have access to a car or even a debit or credit card to pay the associated fees. These are the people that really need access to affordable transportation—to get to work, to have access to healthy food and exercise, to tend to family matters, to have options. Furthermore, the digital divide prevents the poor from even knowing such programs exist.

Baltimore has taken recent initiatives to provide more transportation outlets to city dwellers. The free Charm City Circulator operates three routes connecting popular points downtown. Zipcar car-sharing stations have populated the city, but are mostly concentrated downtown and near universities, ie. near middle-class professionals and internet-savvy students. As with bike rentals, these transport hubs will have to move beyond the Inner Harbor and Mount Vernon areas to offer their services to the true transportation deserts in the city.

A more viable solution might be to provide more affordable bikes to those in need. Velocipede Bike Project is a great resource to get moving on two wheels on the cheap. And (surprise!) international designers are already on top of affordable solutions. Using nine dollars worth of materials, bicycle enthusiast Izhar Gafni has created a fully functioning, water-resistant bicycle, made, from seat to spokes, entirely of recycled cardboard. What if these cardboard bikes were for sale at light rail stations?

Not that smaller scale car-sharing services don’t exist among the poor. I’m sure you’ve seen someone on the side of the road hacking—shaking their forefinger, gesturing for a ride. (I’ve only seen this in Baltimore.) Perhaps there is an opportunity for a social designer to tap into this informal vehicle-sharing system and make it more efficient and available on a larger scale.

From my experience, people who want to commute by bike or cycle as part of a green, healthy lifestyle already own a bike and incorporate cycling into their daily routines as much as they can. Bike sharing might be a great alternative to driving, but only for a select few who know their whereabouts and have the liberty to choose. Sure, an awareness campaign would be a good place to start, but I think further design thinking needs to be employed to change behaviors and update the Baltimore transportation landscape. We need to include those on the other side of MLK and Guilford in our efforts. As social designers we need to seek beyond the traditional boundaries of two-dimensions and create multifaceted ideas that promote positive change.

Aug 01
0

Designing Data

By | Design, Social Media | No Comments

One of the most important roles of a designer is presenting information in a way that is clear and easily understood by the intended audience. When you think about it, this may be the single most crucial thing designers do. It’s at the core of communicating effectively. This coherent visual presentation of information can take many forms, from wayfinding signage in a children’s museum, to user experience design on a mobile website, to making prescription drug containers easier to read for elderly patients.

Data visualization and infographic design has become a developing trend across social design media. The sheer volume and diversity of infographic work on display at design community sites like Visualizing and Visual.ly alone tell me visual data representation isn’t a trend soon to be passé. As information overload increases and our attention span decreases, many think that this type of parsing information will be even more necessary in the future.

Infographics have long been a supporting aspect of journalism by presenting factual or esoteric information in an easy-to-understand format. What would USA Today or the Onion be without their (albeit, amusing) bar charts? With the astronomical surge of information made available to us via the web and new technologies, visualization graphics have become very popular, and much more illustrative. Wired magazine began utilizing this new style of visual data as part of their groundbreaking editorial design in the tech and web magazine market in the late 90s. Good magazine uses infographics so extensively, they have become synonomous with the magazine brand itself. This genre of graphic design has become prevalent enough that design firms have found their niche in solely creating them. Hyperakt, out of Brooklyn, NY, and Column Five Media in California, are two that consistently catch my eye. Posters of information graphics as art can be found on Etsy as well as designer’s personal web stores. Even your resume or LinkedIn profile can be transformed into a pie chart frenzy via Visualize.me.

Invasion of the Drones by Column Five Media for Good magazine.

Of course you can’t talk about all this data visualization without at least mentioning the godfather of it all—Edward Tufte. A statistician and professor emeritus at Yale University, Tufte has written numerous books and essays on information design. Tufte’s infamous criticism of Microsoft PowerPoint as a presentation tool for technical data might elicit chuckles from like-minded graphic designers, but some of his points shoot holes right through the fancy infographics those same designers might create. He argues that PowerPoint uses “chartjunk” to reduce critical data to trivial bullet points and graphs, and that this type of “slideware” favors format over content.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant.

Tufte goes further to suggest that PowerPoint has dumbed down our ways of assembling information, conducting statistical analysis and deductive reasoning. Not to mention degrading the quality of communication and trivializing the actual material.

So what about these elaborate, beautifully-designed graphics whose entire purpose is a visual representation of precious data? Are designers reducing important statistics to our own form of “chartjunk”—illustrated bullet points and color-coordinated Gantt charts? Granted, PowerPoint is primarily a presentation tool, and serves a different purpose than a well-thought-out editorial illustration. In a way, social-cause designers are making their own sales pitch, without the benefit of verbal explanation. In values-based design, these infographics are a large part of disseminating the need behind the call for action. Visual styling should be secondary to the content, or rather, enhance the organization of the message. Form should follow function, but that doesn’t mean black Helvetica on a white page is the best way to do it. As long as the designer considers the information and presents it in a clear way that tells a story or demonstrates a point of view, data visualization graphics will stay true to their purpose.

 

Jul 25
0

Washed Out

By | Design, Social Media | No Comments

Friday I went to see Beasts of the Southern Wild, an independent film about an isolated community in the bayou, and the imaginative six-year-old girl who believes it to be the “prettiest place on earth”. Oblivious to the extreme poverty surrounding her, her world begins to shift as she observes her father dying mysteriously and goes searching for her lost mother. The movie was difficult to watch at times—the filthy living conditions and inhospitable environs made me squirm in my seat more than once. There was no plumbing, no running water, no electricity and no one cleaning up after themselves. All of this trash and human waste contaminating one tiny island. As a sister to a microbiologist, I cringed.

Most of us take for granted the daily access we have to clean drinking water and methods of sanitation that have been established for us in this country. We are the lucky ones. (Thank you, Romans!) According to WASH United, “Globally, one in seven people lack access to even minimum supplies of safe water for basic personal and domestic needs. At any given time almost half of the people in developing countries are suffering from one or more of the main diseases caused by dirty water and poor sanitation, such as diarrhoea, guinea worm, trachoma and schistosomiasis.”  The lack of proper sanitation and plumbing has a far-reaching magnitude as well: “Almost 40% of the world population have no access to sanitation that ensures health, physical safety, privacy and dignity.”

We are resilient creatures, yes, but even the smallest of sanitation changes can make an impact on preventing disease and saving lives lost due to unclean drinking water and unhygienic conditions. WASH United is a coalition of organizations, agencies and sports players dedicated to improving sanitation and promote safe drinking water worldwide. Together with Quicksand, an innovation-led consultancy based in India, and a host of additional contributors and financial supporters, WASH United is launching a water- and sanitation-themed traveling carnival with rides, vendors, games and performances to spread the word about the importance of healthy sanitation measures. The Great WASH Yatra will make 8 stops from New Delhi to Mumbai over 45 days beginning on Mahatama Gandhi’s birthday on October 2, and closing with an end ceremony on November 19th, World Toilet Day.

Today marks the deadline for creative individuals, who wish to take part in this campaigning caravan, to submit a proposal and rough budget for any creative endeavor that would help promote WASH’s mission during the Yatra. Earlier this year, as part of the UnBox Festival, a kick-off for the Great WASH Yatra included a month-long collaboration with performance artists, designers, craftspeople and puppeteers to produce a puppet show that will be part of the traveling carnival. You can get a real sense of the energy behind the performance in this video:

[vimeo 36288496 w=500 h=281]

 

Had I known about this sooner, and had the stars aligned above my glowing laptop screen, I would have jumped at the chance to apply. I can’t wait to hear more about this in the fall and see whose projects are selected. There are eight fellowships available. What a fantastic opportunity to dive straight into the culture of rural India and have a chance to make a real difference not only in people’s daily lives, but also make an impact on worldwide public health.

The next time you wash your Prius or water the lawn, consider that there are people in this country who do not have access to safe drinking water or proper methods of sewage disposal. (Tip: Consider installing a rain barrel or using gray water for these purposes.) With recent cuts to federal funding for drinking and wastewater infrastructure, maybe it’s time to start a campaign here in our own backyard to help provide this basic need and human right to marginalized Americans.

Jami Dodson is a designer, writer, thinker with extensive experience in creative services. She thrives on delivering compelling communications solutions for mission-driven causes. Jami believes that open-minded, cross-disciplinary ways of problem solving are valuable, tangible things, and that they can build awareness and make lasting change in our society. When not designing or volunteering at greening events, you can find her at the farmer’s market or enjoying a manhattan.

Jul 19
0

Dear Blog: I Think I Love/Hate You

By | Design, Social Media | No Comments

It’s with trepidation that I enter the ubiquitous world of “blogging”. Although there’s really no need for quotes anymore—it was eight years ago that Merriam-Webster claimed ‘blog’ the word of the year. The word itself is a combination of two words with separate meanings—called a portmanteau by word-savvy linguists. According to Wikipedia, there were over 156 million public blogs in existence as of February 2011. That’s a lot of cat stories.

For a long time, I harbored a negative resentment toward blogs. I considered donning a t-shirt with “I Hate Bloggers” emblazoned across the front. Well, I didn’t have a problem with blogs per se, I had a problem with the people writing them. Those people who, and you know who you are, are blatenly using them to spew otherwise personal information into the interwebs. In ye olden days, this was called a diary. And it was kept personal. Why does the public at large need to know about your relationship with your therapist? I’ve always been put off by cheeky horn blowers. This new medium has potential to be an agent of transformation, beehives of collaboration, sounding boards for opinion, and yet some of the most popular blogs are unquestionably some of the most low-brow.

Alas, I shouldn’t take things so seriously. CakeWrecks makes me laugh every time. Maybe the reason I hated bloggers so much was because regular joes were given the opportunity (encouraged, even!) to publish openly without needing any technical skill or qualifications, much like how graphic design has changed since the introduction of the Mac. The proliferation of web blogging tools to the masses coincided with the popularity of Photoshop and high-end digital cameras. Now anyone with two hands and access to a computer can be a journalist, a designer, a photographer or an agent of social change. While in some regard this has diluted the validity and quality of these professional creative fields (as in crowdsourcing), it has also provided a mouthpiece for the individual with a means to make a difference.

I wanted more. I wanted to justify spending my precious time reading them. I expected bloggers to be legit, to be experts in their given subject matter. I didn’t want stay-at-home moms waxing nostalgic about scrapbooking. But even that stuff is relevant to somebody. Designers reaching beyond their given aesthetic boundaries and digging into the social relevance of their projects—now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s nerd-out about typefaces, but let’s also elevate design to be the strategic, valuable thing that is essential in today’s rapidly changing world. Isn’t it great to have alternative information sources? Shouldn’t I be celebrating the diversity of the written word and the right to individual thought and creative endeavors? It’s basically an evolution of the newspaper column. Or is it more?

In future posts, I hope to make the best of the responsibility I have as a blogger (and as a designer) and use this space as a platform for thought-provoking ideas and insight about design for social change. I admit it’s also an experiment in self-exploration and in seeking out the changes I’d like to see. Following the advice of Brian Collins, Chief Creative Officer of COLLINS:, an innovation-led firm, “Don’t think of yourself as a problem solver, think of yourself as a problem seeker. Look for challenges to overcome.”

As designers we have the ability to sell a product or shape societal views, sometimes even simultaneously. I’ll be touching on social design projects and collaborations, like MICA’s partnership with Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy. I’ll take a look at group initiatives such as Project M and the upcoming Steamboat Design Camp (which I’m thrilled to attend in August) that bring like-minded designers together. Relevancy is all around us; it feeds different perspectives and ways of design thinking. Good design that is responsible, direct and connects on the human level will always rise to the top.

Now that’s something to blog about.

Jami Dodson is a designer, writer, thinker with extensive experience in creative services. She thrives on delivering compelling communications solutions for mission-driven causes. Jami believes that open-minded, cross-disciplinary ways of problem solving are valuable, tangible things, and that they can build awareness and make lasting change in our society. When not designing or volunteering at greening events, you can find her at the farmer’s market or enjoying a manhattan.