Faith in Action X Soze
Rise + Vote: 2020 Voting Campaign
Design is always a prominent fixture of election years, and 2020 was no exception. Organizations across the country were doing anything they could to get their communities engaged and voting.
The Project
Working with The Soze Agency a Freelance Designer, I was brought on to lead visual branding for Faith In Action’s 2020 voter initiative campaign: Rise + Vote. The intention of the campaign was to motivate unregistered voters, particularly highlighting BIPOC and under-represented cohorts, such as recently incarcerated individuals, to use their voice and vote this election.
Responsibilities
Visual identity, brand guide, campaign toolkit, social media graphics and templates, mask and shirt design options
Note: This campaign launched on September 22nd, 2020 – National Voter Registration Day, and ran through the November 3rd election. The majority of sample elements are mockups.
Branding
2020 was an election year like no other, which meant that the field was saturated with campaigns trying to get as many people to the polls as possible. One of the only things Faith in Action requested was that when creating the brand to stay away from anything that could read as partisan. FIA is a nonpartisan organization and the goal of their campaign was to get anyone and everyone, regardless of affiliation, to use their right to vote. Instead of using typical reds and blues, Rise and Vote utilizes a warm palette of orange and coral that feels approachable and accessible, with black and white to provide graphic contrast when needed.
Accessibility and ease of use was another priority for FIA’s team – their corporate level team would be making some of the graphics and distributing information, but people at the community level would also need to be generating graphics within the campaign’s brand. This meant that the everything from the typography to graphic elements to the templates themselves needed to be easy to use. The typography for this campaign included two typefaces–Work Sans and Rajdhani–both were available on Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts, providing ample access for anyone generating content while also adding contrast to the branded assets through mixing of the two fonts.
Toolkit
Because so many individuals at various levels in the FIA community would be involved in creating assets, the most important deliverable was a toolkit for social media. This included pre-built graphics for FIA’s main page, guidance on how to create posts within the brand, and branded frames for users to drop their photos into. With so many variables at play, it also felt important to provide a guide for how to choose photography for each post. In addition to ensuring no partisan imagery, it was important to factor in the goals and positioning of the campaign: photography should embody positivity and empowerment, and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, showing masks in group settings. See more on Faith In Action’s Instagram and Facebook pages.
The Cutting Room Floor
Like so many projects, especially when naming is involved, this campaign went through a wide range of iterations before FIA landed on Rise + Vote. Below are a selection of a few favorites that didn’t make the cut.
