Free Marvin Guy
Marvin Guy has spent over 8 years in jail without a trial after being the victim of a botched no-knock raid by police.
Police in Killeen, Texas kicked in Marvin Guy's door in the middle of the night and opened fire. Marvin, believing his home was being invaded by gunmen, returned fire. In the crossfire, one of the raiding police officers was killed. Marvin was then beaten and taken to jail, where he has been held without trial for over 8 years, in a wild and egregious violation of his rights.
With Grassroots Law Project, I designed the brand, website, print materials and social graphics for the campaign to see justice for Marvin Guy.
11x17 posters posters and yard signs for the Free Marvin Guy campaign.
Free Marvin Guy signs and banners in use at a Free Marvin rally in Austin, Texas.
Motion graphics video for social media, as part of a call campaign to put pressure on the police officials who are holding Marvin illegally.
Free Marvin Guy signs and banners in use at a Free Marvin rally in Austin, Texas.
Website for the Free Marvin Guy campaign
Organizers taking a selfie while wearing Free Marvin t-shirts, on their way to a Free Marvin candlelight vigil.
Build Back Fossil Free
Over 200 leading U.S. climate and environmental groups joined together to push the Biden administration to do better.
From Greenpeace and the Sierra Club to Patagonia and Ben & Jerry's, the #BuildBackFossil Free coalition is a massive and diverse group of companies, nonprofits and NGOs — all committed to pushing the Biden administration to do more to protect our climate, our communities, and our environment.
Using elements from the Biden campaign's visual style, we created a brand that evokes the trustworthiness, unity and authority of the office of the President, and leverages it to push our leaders to do better.
11x17 posters for the Build Back Fossil Free coalition.
Customizable flyers for the Build Back Fossil Free week of action. Built using Google Drawings so that anyone can quickly and easily make their own printable, downloadable custom flyer.
Social share graphics for a virtual rally, in both English and Spanish.
Early version of the buildbackfossilfree.org homepage.
Graphics for a video truck that was parked in front of the EPA office building in Washington D.C.
The homepage of buildbackfossilfree.org.
Global Climate Strike
More than 7 million people joined the 2019 Global Climate Strike started by youth like Greta Thunberg.
The 2019 Global Climate Strike came after months of school strikes led by youth like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Villaseñor. During the week of September 20-27, over 7.6 million people took part in 6135 actions in 185 countries around the world.
In my role at 350.org, I created a visual style for the strikes that was simple, easy, and free for volunteers to work with (including designing a free typeface, Greve). I also designed and built the globalclimatestrike.net website, as well as posters, stickers, Instagram camera frames and free-to-use Canva templates.
Logo for the 2019 Global Climate Strike in 8 languages.
Global Climate Strike Instagram camera frame, featuring translations of "Global Climate Strike" as a border. The border scales to fit any size device.
Dutch poster for a local Global Climate Strike event in Amsterdam, an example of the open-source brand in use.
"Closed" sign for businesses to use as part of their participation in the climate strikes.
Full-page ad in The Indypendent newspaper for the 2019 Global Climate Strike in New York City.
Circular sticker designed as a free giveaway during the climate strikes.
Greve is a custom display font made specifically for the climate strikes and given away freely as a tool for people to use.
Examples of the Global Climate Strike brand and the Greve font in use on a protest sign.
Promotional Instagram graphic featuring Greta Thunberg.
Equation Campaign
Fighting climate change by funding the frontline groups that are the most affected.
The Equation Campaign is a 10-year campaign that's aiming to cut carbon emissions in half by helping frontline groups — the people whose air, water and land are directly threatened by coal, oil and gas extraction — to fight back against the fossil fuel industry.
I helped them build a brand from scratch, quickly establishing The Equation Campaign as trustworthy source of information, training and resources on resisting fossil fuel projects.
Equation campaign logo and variations.
Equation campaign website (equationcampaign.org) is built on Wordpress using the Baseline framework (see below)
Pattern design, combining topographical maps to evoke a sense of land and geography, and currency engravings to evoke a feeling of trustworthy financial institutions.
Social media graphic for The Equation Campaign.
Cover design for a report used to help raise funding to distribute to frontline environmental groups.
Photo selections to make sure The Equation Campaign team always has a good photo handy.
Diagrams illustrating exactly how The Equation Campaign's strategy will create change.
350.org Global Brand
Global. Multilingual. Open-source. Focused on people, not polar bears. 350.org's blend of online and offline activism shifted what was possible for NGOs.
350 is an NGO built to support the global movement to stop the climate crisis. I was lucky enough to be the lead designer for 350 from the organization's beginning in 2009 until 2020, so I was able to work with the brand in a hands-on way for over a decade.
From the start, we knew that 350's identity needed to focus on two things: One, that climate change is about more than polar bears and icebergs, it's about real people whose lives are being impacted right now. Two, that a grassroots movement needs to have tools that are free, open, and easy to use. No fancy Photoshop tricks, no expensive fonts, no complicated setups.
From 2009 to 2020, I made custom typefaces, designed climate-focused icon sets, managed a Flickr account with over 50,000 Creative Commons-licensed photos of climate actions from around the world, developed a tool that people could use to generate their own custom posters and flyers, and more. All with the focus of helping ordinary people create powerful climate visuals.
Logo for 350.org
Example of 350's brand being customized and used in a local context.
Social media graphic for 350 designed to communicate 350's core message and capture the people-power spirit of 350's mass actions.
Tote bag used as thank you gift for 350's donors. It shipped with a reusable fabric pen so people could fill in the blank and customize the bag for themselves.
Klima is a typeface that's freely available to anyone working on climate change. Designed as a simple, flexible set of fonts for everyone, it also serves as one of 350's brand fonts.
Animated video explaining 350's mission, strategy and values.
350 local group members volunteering outside a concert.
People's Climate March
Over 400,000 people took to the streets in New York City for the People's Climate March.
The 2014 People's Climate March was organized by an unprecedented coalition of hundreds of groups, ranging from labor unions and schools to faith groups and racial justice organizations.
Thousands of climate marches took place around the world, including a march in New York City where over 400,000 people, including Ban Ki-moon, Jane Goodall, and Al Gore gathered in the streets. It was so successful, many of the organizers joined together to form the People's Climate Movement, a non-profit that has since led dozens of national climate-focused events.
I worked with the central organizing committee to make sure the visuals we put out were powerful, clear and consistent. While we made a style guide (and only incorporated free and open-source components), we encouraged people to bring their own style and creativity. The color orange was a central theme that helped tie everything together.
Poster for the 2014 People's Climate March. Photo is from Rockaway Beach where flooding from Hurricane Sandy devastated communities in 2012.
Social media graphic showing one of the early estimates of attendance at the 2014 People's Climate March in New York City. The estimate was later revised to include more than 400,000 people marching that day.
One of the customizable handheld signs for the 2014 People's Climate March in New York City.
Simple guide to using the People's Climate March brand to make your own graphics.
Social media graphic used as part of a promotional event leading up to the 2014 People's Climate March.
Massive banner used at the front of the 2017 People's Climate March in Washington DC. Uses Klima, a typeface I designed and distribute freely for the climate movement.
Route map showing the path of the 2014 march in New York City.
350.org Online Actions Platform
Built on top of the ActionKit platform, I designed, developed, tested and iterated on 350's comprehensive online action system.
Everything from petitions, donation pages, surveys, distributed event campaigns and more — it all ran through our online action system.
In addition to developing a totally custom front-end experience for the system, I also added several custom features that were useful enough that ActionKit took notice and eventually incorporated into the core system.
350.org's main global donation page. We routinely tested variables like donation amounts, background image choice, compact multi-step form vs. long single page form, and more. Link: 350.org/donate
A petition from regional affiliate 350 Pacific using 350.org's petition platform. Showcases some of the customizable options I built in to the platform, like customizable background images, different color schemes. Link: act.350.org/sign/pacificpawa
350 works in hundreds of countries, so their online action system needed to support lots of languages — including East Asian languages like Japanese, seen here. Link: act.350.org/act/g20-2020_ja/
In addition to working in dozens of languages, 350 also often coordinates global days of action where people from around the world take action together simultaneously — the online action system supports that by making it easy to create translated, cross-linked versions of any action. Link: act.350.org/act/paris-response_pt/
In the United States, 350 occasionally runs "call" campaigns, where we provide the tools for people to call their elected officials. People can look up their elected official's contact information, as well as suggested talking points for people who are nervous about what to say. Link: act.350.org/call/house-dems-support-a-green-new-deal
350's online actions platform was designed to scale, so it can by used for very specific, small-scale, local actions, like this one targetting New York City assembly members. Link: act.350.org/sign/assembly-divestny-2020
Baseline Wordpress Framework
A flexible, multilingual, custom-built Wordpress framework used by more than 390 websites.
There are thousands of Wordpress frameworks out there, but none that met the needs I had while working at 350 — our websites needed to be multilingual (including non-Latin alphabet languages like Arabic and Japanese), they needed to integrate with online actions systems like ActionKit, Action Network, ControlShift and more, and we needed to be able to quickly and easily launch new sites with custom colors, fonts and design.
After a few years of doing custom builds for every new site, I saw the potential for a framework that would extend Wordpress' multisite network functionality and allow us to create new websites with customizable design in a single click.
On top of the core framework, I built a custom page builder plugin that allows authors to create pages with complex, multi-section layouts — perfect for homepages.
Website for Fossil Free, a global campaign to help people form local groups and help transition to a world free from fossil fuels. Link: gofossilfree.org
Website for the 2014 People's Climate March (later becoming the People's Climate Movement) Link: peoplesclimatemarch.org
Global website for 350.org, with versions in eight languages. Link: 350.org
"Science" page on 350.org featuring a succinct summary of the latest climate science from Dr. Kimberley Nicholas. Link: 350.org/science
Website for the Exxon Knew campaign, based on uncovered documents proving that Exxon knew about climate change 40 years ago and worked to surpress that knowledge. Link: exxonknew.org/science
Documentation site for the Baseline project, includes basic tips, FAQ, a list of useful CSS classes that are included that allow HTML authors to easily customize their page. Link: baseline.350.org
350 Trainings website, featuring a large archive of useful content for trainers and workshop leaders. We augmented the Baseline framework with several tools, filters, and navigational elements to help people browse this wealth of useful training material. Link: trainings.350.org
Typeface Design
Designing typefaces for activists, free for all non-commercial use.
See the fonts page for more.
Clack is a monospace typeface inspired by typewriter typefaces like those found on the IBM Selectric. Perfect when you need a font that blends utilitarian sturdiness with vintage warmth and personality.
Clack features a full range of weights all the way from thin to black, as well as a full set of italics. A set of variable fonts is also included. Link: wehtt.am/fonts/#clack
Union Gothic is a display typeface that ranges from extremely narrow to ultra wide. It's great for headlines, signs, banners — any place where you need to squish and stretch your text to fit exactly the shape you need.
It was made to test the limits of what you can do with a variable font, to see if it's possible to have a typeface that slides seamlessly from one extreme to another. Link: wehtt.am/fonts/#union_gothic
Mort is a tightly-spaced display typeface that's half Art Deco, half 70's funk. Drawing inspiration from typefaces like Raisonné, Avant Garde, Gill Sans Kayo (fuck Eric Gill, though) and the cover of Mort Garson's 1976 album Plantasia, Mort aims to blend sharp and geometric with quirky and offbeat.
Mort is a variable font with a "weight" axis, so you're using an app that supports it, you can freely adjust the weight to be exactly as bold or as light as you need. Link: wehtt.am/fonts/#mort
A workhorse monospace typeface suited for paragraph text, UI elements and writing code. Designed while in the town of Katwijk on the north coast of the Netherlands in January 2018 while working on the Fossil Free project.
Big, bold, with a little old west flavor. Arroyo is a chunky wedge serif typeface with sharp, exaggerated serifs.
Link: wehtt.am/fonts/#arroyo
Simple and versatile. Designed first and foremost to be a body font suited for paragraph text. The very light and very bold weights can make for a nice title or headline, though.
Link: wehtt.am/fonts/#klima
Other Projects
Unique, unusual, or otherwise interesting one-off projects.
"Keep it in the Ground" banner using Graph, made by the Green Party of Ireland. Photo taken at the top of the Cliffs of Moher.
100-meter wide image of a polar bear drawn on the Langjökull glacier in Iceland using biodegradeable food coloring. Part of a series called eARTh, where large-scale land art was created and then photographed by satelite.
Anti-mountaintop removal video from Rainforest Action Network, featuring a voiceover from Susan Sarandon. Watch on YouTube.
Massive Greenpeace banner drop from a coal crane in Cirebon, Indonesia. Uses Graph as the typeface.
Melina Laboucan-Massimo and Jane Fonda at the March for Jobs, Justice and Climate in Toronto, Canada, July 2015. Font is Graph.