2013 was a landmark year for Design Action Collective. We celebrated our 10 year anniversary and strengthened our relationships with organizations working for social change. Here are some highlights:
10 Years of Designing for Change
To mark our 10 year anniversary, we did a retrospective show at the SoleSpace gallery in Downtown Oakland on March 8. Because our show opened on International Women’s Day, we released a new poster at the event titled “Speak Out Against Gender Violence.”
Our goal for this show was not simply to showcase the huge body of work that has come out of Design Action over the years, but to celebrate the organizers and activists we’ve had the honor of working with on successful campaigns and ongoing struggles.
Check out our Video Retrospective.
We all had a great time dancing the night away!
Check out the article in Oakland Local by Bonnie Chan.
A Year Full of new Logos, Websites, and Infographics
We are proud to have launched 36 new websites, designed new logos for 40 organizations, and flooded social media with timely campaign graphics. Here are a few…
Social Media Graphics
Info Graphics
We have sharpened our skills in the art of data visualization and created several infographics this year.
Design Action Out and About
In addition to sitting at our computers building websites and designing campaign materials, Design Action members were out in the streets and organizing with our diverse communities around issues or gender justice, workers rights, and immigrant rights.
In March of 2013, Josh Warren-White attended the World Social Forum in Tunisia as a photographer for the Grassroots Global Justice delegation representing social movements across the United States, including delegates from many of our client organizations such as Causa Justa/Just Cause (CJJC), Asian Pacific Environmental Netwrok (APEN), Labor/Community Strategy Center, Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), Miami Workers Center (MWC), Southwest Workers Union (SWU), and many more. It was a powerful experience to be in the birthplace of the Arab Spring building solidarity with leaders from the front lines of social movements around the world. Below is a collection of photographs from the delegation. You can read the full reportback from the US delegation here.
Poonam Whabi and Sarah Reilly are part of the Brass Liberation Orchestra (BLO). They brought up the precussion section this year as BLO played energetic music at the May Day March for Immigrant Rights, the climate justice rally at the Richmond Chevron Refinery, and rallies supporting BART’s striking workers to name a few.
Nadia Khastagir has been working with San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR) for many years — designing the logo and outreach materials for the organization. Nadia is now on the board for SFWAR and helped put on a successful event this year honoring the organization’s 40th anniversary.
Andrea Salazar and Ria have participated in several local hackathons developing empowering tech tools. Ria participated in Trans*H4CK, the first-ever hackathon focused on bringing together trans and gender non-conforming tech workers to create projects that advance social justice. The tool Ria’s team created, Trans Resource US, won Trans*H4CK.
A is for Activist, the ABC book for the 99% that Inno wrote and produced originally as a Design Action project, turned out to be a hit. It won the Horace Mann Upstanders New Talent Award, and sold out by mid year. Since then it has been picked up by Seven Stories Press and is already going into a second printing with them. AND a Spanish adaptation by the Grammy Award winning lead singer or Quetzal, Martha Gonzalez, is coming soon!
Design Action members gave presentations on communications for grassroots activism and participated in panel discussions on worker coops at several conferences and events this year including Allied Media Conference, The Western Worker Coop Conference, and the Aspiration Tech Nonprofit Software Development Summit.
We are grateful to our community for helping us to stay accountable to the changing, evolving needs of the movement. We look forward to more collaborations in 2014!