Strategic Visual Design: Skills for Communications and Organizing
In organizing and movement building words are important. The right words can be crucial to building a strong campaign, and the wrong words can be devastating. The same is true of visuals, but too often our visuals fall short of delivering the powerful message we’re organizing around.
Good news: you don’t need to be a graphic designer to make powerful graphics!
Powerful visuals are strategic. They connect to the sensibilities of your target audiences while reflecting best practices. This training will change how you think about what you make, build your internal capacity, and develop your design thinking.
Our interactive, three-session online seminar will teach you how to:
Understand basic design principles
Set strategic goals for visual design
Identify the aesthetics of your audience
Start designing your own powerful images
Overcome creative and technical blocks
Get updated best practices for social media graphics
Take quality photos of members, rallies, or actions
Connect your visual design to content strategy
Communicate design requirements to consultants
There’s a million YouTube videos on how to use Canva. But this training will teach you what to make on Canva—or on simpler design platforms.
Spring 2025 schedule to be announced soon
Each session is 90 minutes long with a 10-minute break. Sessions combine instruction, peer discussion, workshopping and optional readings. This format will help you internalize what we are teaching so you can apply it to your work right away.
Webinars are recorded in case you are unable to attend, however these seminars are highly interactive, so we encourage you to participate live.
Note: Taking our Finding Your Organization's Authentic Voice course is not required but this class is complementary to the skills you would learn there.
Trainers: New Media Mentors’ Program Director Elana Levin is joined by Senior Design Strategist and visual artist Ange Tran. Tran’s design work spans everything from Occupy Sandy to labor unions to museums.
Cost: Price is $650 for one person and $200 for each additional person from the same organization. This pricing encourages organizations to send staff to participate together as a team.
Class size is limited to ensure personal attention. Limited need-based scholarships will be available to organizations with budgets of under $1 million.
Eligibility: We work with a broad range of groups fighting to make the world a more equal, fair and just place. On rare occasion we may have a conflict of interest that might prevent us from working together. We also screen applicants to make sure this content is a good match for each student's skill level. We do not train consultants or businesses.
Sign-up today!
We carefully screen our participants to make sure the course fits their needs and our eligibility requirements. Space is limited.
If you have other questions? Contact Us!
