Good design doesn’t need much to say something meaningful. Some of the most powerful messages in history have been delivered with the simplest tools — a symbol, a color, a single well-chosen word. The medium doesn't have to be sophisticated. The idea does.
There’s something freeing about that. When you stop chasing complexity and start trusting clarity, design becomes less about resources and more about intention. That's where the real work happens, and where anyone, with almost anything, can make something that resonates.
–Robert (@robertvidaure)
Hello WeHo
Hello WeHo is a civic communications campaign by LA studio Kilter for the City of West Hollywood, a new storytelling platform designed to make city news feel less like government messaging and more like the community itself. Kilter developed a youthful illustration style with playful, diverse characters and bold color, paired with a friendly tone of voice, rolling the campaign out across bus shelters, print, and digital channels.
What Kilter got right with Hello WeHo is something a lot of cities get wrong: government communication isn’t just an information problem, it’s a trust problem. By leading with illustration, personality, and a tone that sounds like an actual neighbor, they shifted the city from institution to community member.
Buttons of the Left is a Chicago-based archive and educational project that treats the humble pinback button as a primary historical document. Using buttons and other personal wearable ephemera, the project connects audiences to over a century of movements for social justice, peace, and equality, collecting and preserving them as artifacts of working-class history, then bringing them into schools, unions, and public spaces through exhibits and workshops.
The pinback button might be the most democratic design object ever made — cheap to produce, easy to wear, impossible to ignore. It’s a format that works at every scale, from union halls to the Golden Globes, where celebrities recently wore “Ice Out” buttons on the red carpet.
What Buttons of the Left understands is that these weren’t just souvenirs. They were a visual language for people who had no other platform. That’s civic design before anyone called it that.
He Did It for Free. They Flew Him to Australia.
What started as a designer goofing around on Instagram, letting Google Earth pick local businesses to rebrand for fun, turned into an all-expenses-paid trip to Australia. A Brisbane promoter account kept sliding into the comments asking Caleb Nugent to take a crack at their city. He eventually did it for free, and they loved it enough to fly him over. It’s a good reminder that unsolicited passion projects can open unexpected doors, even if the line between spec work and serendipity is a little blurry here.
Civic Signals
One dataset, 100 different ways to visualize it — a proof of concept that how you show information is as important as the information itself.
Science is catching up to what good city designers have always known: access to nature isn’t a luxury, it’s infrastructure.
IsoCity lets you build and manage a metropolis complete with roads, zoning, pedestrians, trains, planes, and a full economy simulation.
A directory of 500+ European software companies. A practical resource for anyone looking to replace US tech platforms with GDPR-compliant alternatives that keep data on European soil.
