100 DAYS OF DEMOCRACY

challenging designers to answer 100 questions about local, state, national government and voting

Since 2016, I’d been marinating on the idea of curating a well-designed visual repository for like-minded creatives to help make democracy easier to understand. At the end of 2019, I convinced former AIGA leaders Elysia Syriac and Karen Kurycki to collaborate with me on making this idea happen. After I conceived of the original concept, designed the brand, wrote the mission, and stood up the website and communication channels, Elysia and Karen were critical partners in organizing, recruiting, and delivering 100 days of designer-contributed artwork, which can be seen at instagram.com/100daysofdemocracy. The website is at 100daysofdemocracy.com and additional community pages can be found on Facebook and Twitter. After 2020 concludes, we plan on iterating on the concept and continuing to build out the repository by engaging designers across the country to answer our 100 prompts.

ORIGINAL MISSION STATEMENT

Graphic design is the art of communication. A designer's job is to simplify the complex by distilling information into messaging with meaning. We take the convoluted and make it clear, direct and easier to comprehend, and nothing needs that more than how our government operates. The goal of 100 Days of Democracy is for designers (and design friends) across the country to work together to educate and empower ourselves and our neighbors to be more informed, responsible and effective citizens.

The #100DaysofDemocracy project is a movement dedicated to making information about civic participation and responsibility more accessible and inclusive so our government can work better for everyone. We're doing that by challenging design and design-adjacent professionals to create 100 days of art illuminating the hows and whys of participating in our Local government, State government, National government and Voting. The 100 days is broken down into 4 quarters; in each, we'll share 25 prompts, challenging each participant to find and design the answers based on where they live. These submissions will be gathered, organized and uploaded to a repository for citizens, educators, community leaders to access openly and use to advance the overarching goal.

project goals + tactics

This project has 3 big goals:

1. Create an open-source repository of visual resources for use by civic organizers, activists, educators, community leaders and everyday citizens

2. Simplify the complexities of voting and participating in local, state and national issues to break down the barriers to participation

3. Get people stoked about becoming more responsible citizens

This project plans to achieve the above by:

• Activating our network of creatives whose influence might attract more interest and participation in the project and its overarching goals

• Breaking the 100 day challenge into 4 quarters: Local, State, National levels of government and Voting; Participants can tackle the full 100 or focus on just one quarter

• Engaging designers across the country to participate (and collaborate) so we can get more coverage and build a more robust library of information

• Creating online communities to encourage and mentor each other during the entirety of the challenge and after

• Using Peer Pressure + FOMO