CLIENT
Personal Project
ROLE
Founder, Graphic Designer, Creative Director
CATEGORY
Graphic Design, Social Design
SOFTWARE
Adobe Illustrator
Casual Ableism is a personal project I developed during lockdown 2020. This project is a mix of graphic design meets disability advocacy – two of my passions brought together to create a social media community which helps highlight real life stories of casual ableism experienced by people within the disabled & chronically ill community. Casual Ableism is a social media based community, a platform of acceptance & a place to help raise awareness about casual ableism, centred around a bold, positive & accesible design style.
Project background + description
Casual Ableism started as an experimental personal project. It was an idea I had in the middle of the night, whilst thinking over many past experiences of ableism. I thought that these experiences can’t only be happening to me, surely? What if I shared them on social media to highlight how these subtle comments were casual ableism?
Initially this idea was to give myself a space to share these experiences, a way to process it all.
I wanted to make this a graphic, eye-catching, bold & powerful piece. The concept was to share these experiences that made me feel small, in a bold, powerful way – take back control & use the negative for positive.
As the Casual Ableism account grew, so did the number of submissions from other people who wanted to share their similar situations of casual ableism. I soon realised that this was not just for me, this was for a much larger community.
Project goals + objectives
- Accesible design in terms of colours, typography,
- To appeal aesthetically to the followers (i.e. be an account you’d want to have on your feed)
- ALT Text of post content
- Image Description in post captions
- Camel Case Hashtags for screen readers (#ThisIsCamelCase)
- To provide an easy & accessible way for followers to submit their stories
- To keep listening to our followers in terms of how we can keep improving accessibility
The design process
Accessibility needed to be a key part of the design, so I used my research from ‘Me da igualdad’ to make sure that the typography, colour scheme & post structures would be accessible for various disabilities. Accesible & inclusive design is an ongoing topic that we can only keep learning, researching & talking about. The requirements in terms of accessibility gave strict conditions to the overall design process, but this only made it a more interesting process & it increased my knowledge of accesible design theory.
Creative Solution
The account needed to have a logo – something that the community could recognise. It needed to be simple, accessible & clear to understand. The word mark needed to be a digital sans serif font, easily legible & have high contrast with large inner eyes of the letters.
After testing many high contrast fonts I found that Sen Bold was the most legible font for the word mark, with its large eyes & high contrast form.
The typography for the body text needed to be a digital sans serif font with good legibility. Open Sans is known for its legibility for digital use, whilst still having a modern feel & it paired well with the heading font, Sen.
I knew that placing text straight onto a coloured background would cause legibility issues for a large group of followers, especially taking into account the small size of social media posts. I wanted to create a bold & colourful feed for the account, using the technique of creating a flowing grid where each post was different in its own right, but when brought together on the grid, created a larger flowing design.
The creative solution for the post design was to feature a never ending gradient of bright, highly saturated colours, with a solid white or black rectangle placed over it to house the text. The horizontal logo version was placed at the bottom lefthand corner of each post. Some posts feature a hashtag at the bottom righthand corner, depending on the post’s content.
