Expressing diversity of opinion efficiently

“Texas Votes” was the second project I worked on for the Headcount organiztion. Their mission is to GOTV with registration booths and swag at concerts, shows, and other musical events for young people.

In the final weeks of the 2020 election, I burnt the midnight (and 1am. And 2am…) oil writing, designing, illustrating and even animating a short-form music video for them called “Time to Vote” featuring the band Lawrence (read more about that here).

As demographics have shifted over time, every election cycle sees Texas moving closer to much-desired “swing state” status. I wanted a quick, simple, and most importantly graphic way to express this. Clearly, and with little nuance to cloud things. This would of course be a non-partisan graphic but I used multiple typefaces and a blue-to-red gradient fill to express the power in numbers we can often (understandbaly) forget that we possess. And that goes for both sides of the political fence.  

To put it into motion it needed to hit, make its point, drop a CTA and be gone in under 5 seconds. Almost like an act of visual punctuation…

Behavior change doesn’t have to feel like a chore

Waste disposal and the proper sorting of it. Organics, recyclables, hazzardous and bulky waste. There are so many rules that its natural that option fatigue would make someone throw their hands up at it all. And while proper waste disposal is certainly an inevitable responsiibility, there’s no reason it needs to feel like the chore that it is. On top of this, a good habit is one you start early on. I remember as a kid, Captain Planet having a pretty pronounced effect on my generation. Maybe there was a way to put some of that fresh energy to use for Sacramento’s SacGreenTeam, an arm of Sacramento County’s waste disposal service aimed at promoting sensible environmental stewardship at the household level. 

Meet the “Bin fluencers”  

Yeah, its a goofy pun, but I wanted something with a little “bounce” to it since I’d be designing the characters in an almost primary color, school workbook vibe in the best tradition of far better illustrators like Milton Glaser. The Binfluencers would be color-coded to their specific type of waste and be drawn as simple vector illustrations in extreme, towering perspective and funky, bold proportions. And each would be so proud of their positive behavior they pulled out their phones to record the moment.

The other great thing about this approach is that Lottie animations for web were fast becoming a way to deliver high quality, infinitely-scalable animations across a number of channels and device types. The Binfluencers were made for this moment. And they exist everywhere from various social channels (where we saw engagement far beyond what you’d normally expect for a sanitation service) to the Recycle Reboot website where we offered practical tips for conscientious waste reduction and disposal to more commonplace assets like home mailers and fun swag like stickers and coloring pages for kids to help keep them engaged with proper waste handling. 

And using the fun visual language of color-coded illustrations made them universal in a way that really helped when translating their message across the myriad languages present in the Sacramento area. From Spanish to Tagalog, these simple characters reached across cultural differences and really reached people. We used local language translation and education service Language World to help make these characters resonate with an international flavor…

The above scenes were animated by Sacramento’s Noble Creative Collective, who also valiantly handled post on the full spot, seen below…

In fact, they really added something to even the most utilitarian spots on municipal waste and I think that spark of life is really what helped move the needle in some pretty substantial ways for the client.

Resulting in…

Defining and refining the brand

I did the poster design and some social and motion assets for 2022’s Same Same But Different festival in Southern California on Lake Perris (you can see my work from that year here) and the promoters liked the work so much they asked me to return for the 2023 fest, but this time in an expanded role. A common factor with most music festivals is how they often start off with a less disciplined brand system, usually defined and then refined after the fest has had a few years to get up and running. During those first few years there can be a few too many variations in color, type, texture, etc. present and SSBD wanted the 2023 iteration of the event to have a more structured brand system and they wanted me to be part of creating that look.