I’ve been freelancing full time as a graphic designer and illustrator for nine and a half years now and in that time I’ve figured out a few simple rules – one of which is that I only work with clients whom I personally like, and another of which is that I do not work for any client whose ethics do not sit well with my own*. It seems that the more I follow these rules the more they do for me – right now I’m working for some people whom I bloody well adore, and for organisations and causes I never dreamed I could be a part of. I am very lucky.
This was absolutely the case when my good friend Jay McNeil asked me to create a logo for his new organisation Traverse Research. Jay is a campaigner for trans* people’s rights and Traverse has been set up to support trans* needs through equalities research. He’d scribbled something logo-ish on a bit of paper involving a mountain range and the name and asked me if I could do something with said scribble. As someone who identifies as gender-queer and who frequently experiences frustration with heteronormative assumptions and the gender binary, I said yes I was more than happy to. Here is the result:
Of the logo, Jay said, “Seriously, that’s fucking great!” Which is nice.
Jay then asked if I’d like to get involved with designing the Trans Mental Health Study 2012 – the largest of its kind in the WORLD. It’s harrowing but compulsive reading and I really think everyone should take a look. It’s very well-written and not at all in the dry academic style we’ve come to expect from these sorts of reports. You can download it in full here. It was a bit of a last minute job; it had to be designed and proof-read and edited in I think about 48 hours and that included all of the diagrams and graphs and what-not! By the time I had got around to designing the cover I’d been staring at the screen so long I had no idea if it was even any good at all! Luckily I think it turned out okay 😉
You can watch a short (7 minute) moving and heart-felt speech by Jay discussing the report at the Sheffield event for the Transgender Day of Remembrance here. TDoR is on 20th November every year and commemorates the lives of those people worldwide who have been murdered because they were transgendered.
I am very proud to have been involved, in my small part, with this vital project. Thank you so much to Jay for asking me and all the best and brightest wishes for the future of Traverse Research x
*In the past I’ve turned down work for an angling supplies company (I’m vegan) and the opportunity to pitch for Vodafone (I’m pretty much into companies paying tax), among other things. (You may choose to read into this that I’m some kind of bleeding-heart tree-hugging hippy liberal type – I couldn’t possibly comment)
Social movements need designers and communicators too, it’s brilliant that you’ve been able to do this work for them. Sadly organisations that are funded by donations or taxpayers are rarely allowed to spend that money on decent communication materials, which I think has a seriously detrimental impact on the amount of good work that can be done, since your average campaigner/researcher/activist is not necessarily any good at communicating what they’re doing.
Thanks Maeve. I wanted to make the report as easy to read and interesting to look at as possible but most of the work was already done for me in that it was so well written and thoughtfully arranged by Jay and the team. I am so glad it’s been taken so seriously by people in mental health care and been downloaded so many times. It’s the most important thing I have ever worked on and I am deeply honoured to have been asked to get involved.
Oh, and regarding budget for communications materials – it’s a real pity that the powers that be often see design as a sort of optional add-on, when in fact the way something is designed is paramount to how accessible its contents are to readers.
It would be great to have some sort of design basic-skills workshop for researchers to enable them to present their findings in as reader-friendly a way possible. Maybe I’ll get around to writing a blog post about it.
Another option is for a designer to create a basic format in Word or some such that the researcher can then follow.
But the best of all would be for the government to realise the import of this work and fund it – and its presentation – properly. We can but hope… *sigh*