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Hi friend, Most social enterprises I know are juggling twelve priorities and one Google Doc with a truly incomprehensible style sheet. Think you need new software or divine inspiration? Maybe what you need is five quiet minutes to make the things you already use look like they belong to an organization that knows what it's doing. Design is intention made visible. When people see care in the small stuff, they assume it's everywhere else too. That's how visual trust works. A few small acts of rebellion against Default Blue and Calibri Fatigue:I've built a Google Docs template with custom styles already set up for you. You're welcome! Grab the template here. Once you have that template in front of you, here's what makes the difference:
Showing Up IntentionallyConsistency compounds, wouldn’t you say? One well-designed document doesn't change much, but when that same intentionality shows up across your messaging, that's when people start recognizing you before they even read your name. This kind of visual consistency is infrastructure, not decoration. It's what makes your organization feel coherent instead of cobbled together. And if you're realizing you need someone to actually build that infrastructure across all your touchpoints—to set up your Canva brand kit, design your newsletter template, or finally create that brand system or web redesign everyone keeps talking about—that's exactly the kind of work I do.
About Reesa Beyond design, I'm a parent to a young girl gang, and move from weightlifting to vernacular jazz dance (though seldom together), along with reading, cooking, and reading about cooking. I'm always happy to talk about vegetarian food or my temperamental sourdough starter, Pudding. |
If your team is doing it all, this is for you: accessible, practical, and occasionally weird monthly dispatches on accessibility-focused branding and marketing. Stuff you can use now, freebies when I've got them, and the occasional rant about the sector's bad habits. So you can build community alignment and push your mission further.
There's a project every organization has and nobody wants to start. Starting means choosing one problem over five others, spending money you're not sure you can justify, and hoping you've picked the thing that will actually make a difference. Sound familiar? The website has been "good enough" for three years. The donation form works, technically, if you have the patience of someone who really, really wants to give you money. The brand works for funders but it doesn’t speak to your community....
Hey Reader, You know that moment in school when the teacher is looking to call on someone and you quickly avert your eyes? In the social sector, design work has a way of looking like it fell on the desk of whoever didn't look away in time. They weren't quite prepared, and their brain definitely wants to be somewhere else. Still, the need is real, the deadline is looming, the tools to make it happen exist, and someone is close enough to it to push some pixels around. So something gets made,...
Hi Reader, Once, I was handed a slide deck. A marketer at an agency had built it in Canva as reference material for the brand audit package I was putting together. It was tidy enough. It also could have belonged to anyone, and in a way it did. Even though the colours had been swapped out, the fonts adjusted, the content dropped in, something was missing. The thinking that makes design actually work for a specific organization, a specific community, a specific message, wasn't there. It...