Design for Elections

If you’ve chatted with me any time this year, you’ve probably heard that I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time volunteering for various campaigns across the US. I’ve been involved with Get Her Elected, Ragtag, and Tech for Campaigns, civic tech orgs focused on helping progressive candidates. I’m also the Website Director for Alessandra Biaggi’s campaign for New York State Senate.

Civic tech kept me going this year. I spent much of last year in a useless haze. I felt powerless. This year, I was determined to take back my agency. Volunteering on campaigns allowed me to use my skills to make a difference. Whenever I felt despair sinking in, I’d work harder, or volunteer for another project. I had networks of other civic techies who kept me buoyed and provided support and encouragement.

Now that the Midterms are (mostly) over, I wanted to share some of the work I’ve done. Pretty much all of these were collaborative efforts with other civic tech volunteers across different organizations.

Site Design

Site design is my specialty. I’m great at taking minimal amounts of content and stretching it into decent “brochure” style site.

Most of the campaign sites I worked on this year were built on Squarespace or WordPress. WordPress is, obviously, my specialty, but I had a lot of fun learning the ins-and-outs of Squarespace, which is a pretty amazing platform for getting an attractive site up ASAP. 

Here are some of the sites I worked on:

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And some landing pages I did for Alessandra Biaggi’s campaign:

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Ad Design

This was my first foray into ad design, and I learned a lot in a short amount of time — best practices, sizing and formats, Facebook’s 20% text rule, etc. Here’s some of my favorite ads:

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With the Midterms wrapping up, I find myself wondering what’s next. Voter suppression and disenfranchisement, and Gerrymandering, continue to play a destructive role in our elections. I’d love to find a way to help fight both with my design skills. I want to work on tools to make campaigning easier, especially for candidates without a ton of resources. If you come across any orgs looking for design volunteers to tackle these issues, send them my way!