ELECTNYC 2021
CLIENT Citizens Union Foundation
CONTENT STRATEGIST Shabd Simon-Alexander
2021
Social media design direction for ElectNYC, a guide to New York City’s 2021 Primary Elections developed by Citizens Union Foundation. I worked with content strategist to develop a trustworthy and engaging graphic design direction for social media that would engage partners, activists, and the public in the three months leading up to the June 2021 Primary Election in NYC. In this election voters would elect candidates to a record number of positions using ranked choice voting for the first time. The primary goal of this campaign was to drive viewers to the ElectNYC website, which hosted extensive information about the candidates running and how to vote in NYC.
PROJECT ELEMENT 1
Easy to use graphic design kit-of-parts in Canva, a graphic design platform.
PROJECT ELEMENT 2
Training for ElectNYC staff and interns on Canva basics
Inspiration for the design of the campaign came from NYC’s borough flags as well as social media graphics by peer organizations including State of the Vote, the ACLU, Vote Save America, Marie and Otto Neurath’s work with the Nigerian government in the 1950s, and Citizen Union’s branding.
The kit-of-parts included icons, "stickers", banners, backgrounds for Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, and pieces of geography.
A key element of the branding was a set of icons to represent 15 key issue areas for NYC voters. These icons combined flat shape illustrations, stock photographs, and geometric patterns showing that democratic elections aren’t about a single perspective on an issue, but about accounting for diverse perspectives on complex systemic issues. Smaller versions of the icons included only the flat shape illustration.
PROJECT ELEMENT 3
Systematized templates for posts sharing information on city council races (NYC has 51 city council districts, find yours here)
City council district templates were color coded by borough, for example all Queens-related templates were blue.
Templates included space to ask questions of the reader, designed to engage people in the democratic process by making them think about how the election would affect issues in their district.
