Democracy Defense Coalition: Voters Decide Typemark

Lead Designer: Hannah Cusworth
Brand Designer: Jay Davis
Creative Director: Matt Ipcar

The challenge: How do you get millions of people to say the same thing at a moment’s notice? That was one of the biggest challenges around our work with Fight Back Table, now known as Democracy Defense Coalition (DDC). The DDC is a coalition of 230+ grassroots and progressive organizations working to mobilize state leaders and activists across the country to defend voters’ rights, uphold the legitimacy of elections, and ensure that the people’s voice is heard in the 2020 election.

The solution: In just a few days leading up to the election, I designed a microsite for the DDC that solved for a number of problems: build their digital footprint, increase visibility, gain legitimacy as a reputable coalition, and build a mechanism with which to distribute messaging and assets quickly. In addition to a swiftly-designed microsite, I led the typemark design of the DDC’s top-line message that would soon be printed on swag and distributed across the country in order to rally people together under one message: Voters Decide.

The result: Counting every vote, and putting power in the hands of the people where it belongs.

I designed this easy-to-print and reproduce typemark just days before the election. I was inspired by the tipping scale of the Lady Justice statue outside the U.S. Supreme Court as well as the upward trajectory of graph lines of counted votes shown throughout the election’s media coverage. Key stakeholders from the coalition wanted this wordmark to remain purely typographic (without any illustrated elements), so I chose a typeface that not only exhibited strength and energy but also carried some subliminal significance in relation to this pivotal election.

I chose the typeface Termina not only because the family’s high x-height and wide letterforms help retain legibility and readability at both large and small sizes, but also because of where it was originally designed: a type foundry based in Georgia. I knew Georgia was going to be (and later proved to be) a historic player in deciding our next president and Senate majority, so the typeface’s birthplace was a design decision of both intention and hope.

Social Media Graphics

The Coalition also wanted us to provide a social media toolkit of assets to provide their organizations with messages to circulate across their channels. Since a scrappy, all-hands-on-deck process drove this entire movement, I wanted the graphics to emulate that ardor. Applying a collage-like effect to our social graphics helped humanize this message and illustrate the patchwork of the DDC’s mobilization work and that of the people whose votes deserved to be counted.