The movement to strengthen early childhood education in Detroit is growing, and we are excited to be a part of it. The Southeast Michigan Early Childhood Funders Collaborative engaged us to plan, design, and implement a citywide campaign to boost enrollment in Detroit’s 65 Head Start centers along with our partners from Early Works.

In October, The Work Department finished the new identity system for Allied Media Projects (AMP). Through the crucial research and ideation phases, we took a deep dive into what makes AMP unique and explored how to express these key values through a simple form. We think the process went very well and we love the end result. We asked Mike Medow, Director of Finance and Communications at AMP, a few questions about visual identities and his thoughts on the project.

Have you heard of Tour de Troit? Many locals know it as the annual massive bike ride that’s been taking place in Detroit for 12 years. The event is an incredible undertaking that has become very successful. It’s evolved into an organization that now produces multiple events focused on cycling and running while financially supporting non-motorized transportation projects.

When you meet someone for the first time, there are a range of clues that inform you about the person’s daily life, personality, history, goals and dreams. You might ask yourself ‘Why is this person wearing a neon yellow holographic jumpsuit? Or a custom tailored suit? Why are they speaking loudly? What does it mean if they are wearing utility boots and holding a hammer?

We view the Allied Media Conference as an energetic network of self-contained, radical processes. Each year, these elements combine and remix to generate inspirational and multidimensional landscapes where individuals and communities work toward building more just and creative worlds.

Our approach to the design and development for the ACM 2012 visual identity was deeply inspired by connection, transformation and participatory design. We set out with the goal to create a kinetic “kit of parts” that could be consistently utilized throughout all of the conference communication vehicles — whether a website, sticker, environmental sign or printed program. Through this work, we facilitated a collaborative design process that builds on the conference’s rich visual history and creates a platform for a library of unique visual language and co-design processes.

At The Work Department, we’ve had the privilege of creating Commotion’s brand identity from conception to completion. If you haven’t heard about it yet, Commotion is an open, yet secure, circumvention tool to create decentralized mesh networks. We are collaboratively developing the tool with The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. Our challenge was clear: to create an accessible and flexible visual identity for this evolving open source software project. Our early approach was very open – we began with a discovery phase in which we surveyed the Open Technology Initiative (OTI), The Guardian Project, The Serval Project and a few other members of the mesh development community to understand their views on the software. We quickly found a wide range of opinions about aesthetic preferences and public communication strategies for Commotion. We analyzed input from about 15 people and shared the material with OTI to get additional feedback.