Birthday reflections

This month, we’re celebrating the Center for Civic Design’s 8th birthday. Over the past 8 years, we’ve seen many changes in the world of elections. Through it all, our small, but mighty, team remains committed to using good design to help address barriers to voting. 

We’ve had the immense pleasure of working with a range of partners—both in and out of government—over the years. It was tough, but we managed to pull together a list of some of our highlights to share with you below. 


8 of our favorite projects from CCD’s history


1. Publishing the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent

Before CCD was even an idea, we started researching and designing our Field Guide Series. In 2012, over 300 individuals contributed to the kickstarter to bring these guides to life. Nearly 10 years after that kickstarter campaign, they continue to be used by election administrators across the country.
Last month, we received this note:This week I had a board member come in to get sworn in. She’s older and doesn’t own a computer and has been really struggling in the zoom era. She noticed the CCD Election Field Guides on my desk and got really excited, and has started borrowing them. I’m really excited cuz she’s been one of my bellwethers for how accessible our remote access procedures are and I can’t wait to talk to her about the field guides. The Field Guides doing the good work! If you were one of those original backers, thank you for making this story, and countless others, happen!


2. Co-creating Electiontools.org

One of our favorite projects was when we partnered with the Center for Tech and Civic Life and election officials to create electiontools.org, an online library of free or low-cost tech resources for election offices.  
 It launched in June 2016, and we’re continuing to update and refine the toolkit to this day. Coming soon: new skin tones for the icon collection and something cool from the CTCL team.


3. Working with states, and then seeing them run with it

We’re lucky enough to get to work with election offices around the country. Sometimes we come in to run a single training on a specific topic, and other times we stick around for months (or years!), partnering with administrators on a range of projects.
 One of our guiding principles is to raise the design IQ of our partners. And we’ve seen time and time again how offices around the country take what we work on together, and then run with it, making resources their own.  Just a few of the many examples out there:


4. Talking to voters about everything from ranked choice voting to accessibility

We don’t just run training on usability testing for election offices, we also do a whole heck of a lot of it ourselves. Over our lifetime, we’ve conducted long-form interviews and usability testing with over 1,000 voters.
 Some of our favorite tests include:

 Ready to try out some user testing in your own office? Full instructions and templates available are available on the electiontools site.


5. Developing a nationwide look for voting by mail

No one knew that 2020 would be the year that vote by mail would become a household term. Luckily, we had a good foundation with a solid design for usable envelopes and signature forms already in use in several states. Starting from that work and webinars cohosted with CTCL and the Vote at Home Institute on best practices for implementing vote by mail, we created a toolkit with templates and samples of all the envelopes and ballot request forms and notices. We put all our materials online for any elections office to use in 2020 – and beyond.

In the 2020 General Election, our envelope designs were used in 12 states, DC, and many individual counties. In 2021, we’ve worked with a few more states and counties to tailor the envelope design to their needs.


6. Building a strong language access program

After the field guides, we began developing additional workbooks to dive deeper into new topics. One of them is Planning Language Access.
 Over the last two months, we’ve held a series of workshops with some county election offices in Michigan to help develop language access plans; next week we’ll be testing Spanish-language vote by mail materials in Maryland, and over the summer we conducted usability testing in Spanish for ranked choice voting materials in New York City.  And with new language determinations set to come out in December, we’re gearing up to do more work on language access.


7. Modernizing voter registration 

We’ve tackled voter registration from many angles over the years:

Happy #NationalVoterRegistrationDay!


8. Growing our team

We might be cheating by including this on our list of projects, but that’s ok. Behind all of these projects is a powerhouse team of civic designers and researchers. We’ve grown over the years, with each new addition intentionally expanding the range of skills and interests on our team.
 This month, we had the chance to get together in person for a two-day retreat in Baltimore. It was our first full gathering since the pandemic began, and the first time that many of our new team members got to meet in person. Coming out of the retreat, we’ve got a whole lot of ideas for future projects.

At the center of all of our conversations at the retreat was you: our partners in election offices and in the elections world at large. What projects would you to see more of? What research questions are floating around in the back of your brain? What would set you up for success in 2022? Let us know at hello@civicdesign.org or on Twitter @civicdesign.

This was originally published in our Civic Designing newsletter. Subscribe on Mailchimp to get election design tips delivered to your mailbox.