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PROJECT

Redesign the annual “election edition” of the Park Perspective newsletter to improve its effectiveness at helping residents successfully vote.

BACKGROUND

The City of St. Louis park puts out a special edition of its Park Perspective newsletter each year to provide information about upcoming elections. Other than relevant content changes for local versus national election years, only relatively minor changes have been made in recent times. Unfortunately, people found the content to be piecemeal and confusing and lacking a cohesive visual style.

The new communications manager, Ben, wanted to take a fresh look at it and gave me the freedom to propose changing as little or as much as I deemed necessary. The only constraints were to keep it to the same size (4 tabloid size pages) and, at minimum, to cover a set of required topics from the city’s elections staff.

TOOLS

Adobe Illustrator (characters and ballot examples)
Adobe InDesign (everything else)

PROCESS

Ben and I agreed to a general workflow:

1. Meet with elections staff for initial input and direction

2. Simultaneously, I would do a first draft of the overall layout while Ben did a first draft on the body copy for each topic. I would merge the draft copy into the draft layout and all subsequent reviews would be made on the latest integrated document.

3. Review and revise with Ben.

4. Review and revise with senior designer.

5. Review and revise with senior copy writer.

6. Review and revise with department director.

7. Review and revise with elections staff.

8. Final review before sending to print vendor.

The initial meeting with elections staff was key, as our primary contact, Michael, told me to check out the Center for Civic Design (CCD), look at their research, and try to implement as many of their recommendations as appropriate and possible. I hadn’t heard of them, and when I looked at their website, I was like a kid in a candy store! They had so much great research, including voter ethnography, and several recommendations were echoed in their findings as well as in the findings of other organizations they referenced.

After the whiteboard, I created a 1:1 paper mockup of the content sections so I could show Ben how it would look as you hold it, unfold it, and open it like a resident would. Then I recreated the layout digitally in InDesign and incorporated Ben’s copy. And then we were off to the races going through numerous review stages. If that seems like a lot of review stages, it was. Still, the document didn’t go through any major design changes after the initial layout - it was mainly copy editing and incremental tweaks.

Ideally, I would like to have conducted my own ethnographic voter research with the local residents. And I would have done A/B testing on various design decisions to get a more concrete idea of how impactful certain design choices would be. However, given our time constraints, I was extremely happy to have great secondary research sources available.

Here are some of the specific design changes I made in addition to the CCD’s recommendations:

• Rename to “Election Guide” as people generally find “Park Perspective Special Edition” vague and confusing

• Increase body copy to 12pt size to enhance legibility

• Consistent application of background colors: blue for city messages, light green/ light orange/ light purple for specific scenario instructions, tan for detailed information, green for major actions

• Consistent use of flat graphic style and avoiding textures and gradients

• Original comic-style character illustrations showing diversity in gender, skin tone, age, and physical ability

RESULTS

“Wow! This. Is. Amazing.”

Those were the first words spoken by elections staff when I handed them a printed copy of the near-final version. I especially loved hearing an audible gasp followed by “people always ask if their vote counted” when they turned to the last page. After all this, you may also be wondering what the CCD’s specific design recommendations were. I rehearsed some talking points for my meeting with the elections staff:

Elections staff liked the Election Guide enough that they shared it with the CCD. And the CCD liked it enough to invite us to participate in a design Q&A session to discuss this with the broader community of elections organizations.

I’m also writing this page of my portfolio right as the Election Guide goes out to residents, and I’ll be following up with the elections staff to see what feedback they can share. I’ll wait until a bit after Nov. 7, 2023 though - elections staff will need some well-deserved recovery time :)

This has easily been the most interesting and rewarding design project I’ve worked on to date. I love that I got a deeper understanding of elections and voter behavior. I love that my work resonated so well with elections staff that their delight was obvious and immediate. And I love that this will help empower more people in the community to make their voices heard.