In the next five minutes, you can help a classroom of students in New Brunswick who’ve decided they want to design an anti-bullying flag.

When we design-think the future of civilization, an inescapable truth is that the lion’s share of creation and delivery will rest on the shoulders of the generation currently in elementary school. In a past post I spoke of the remarkable steps being taken to teach kids how to be design thinkers, but if they don’t have access to technology their ability to play out realistic experiments and solutions is greatly hampered.

I’ve also written about crowdsourcing sites like Kiva that make it possible to support education in the Developing World. However, surrounded by all our gadgets and bandwidth, it’s easy to assume that the bounty of the information age has fully permeated the public school systems right here in Canada. Not always so...


Not only are there disparities amongst provinces and territories, but also between urban and rural schools. Schools in the same city, separated by a few city blocks can be at opposite ends of the socio-economic divide. While some schools thrive, others struggle to provide much-needed resources like science equipment, computers, projectors, tablets, and assistive technologies for mitigating disabilities.

Which is why I was so excited to come across some beautifuly do-good design ingenuity right here in Ontario: MyClassNeeds.ca tackles the challenge of equipping our K-12 classroom projects, matching donors with appeals from schools through a crowdsourcing platform specifically designed to liberate students. Any certified teacher at a publicly-funded Canadian school can submit a need through the website, and then donors from across Canada or the globe can pledge to help a specific project. It’s like Kiva (and with a tax receipt recognized by the Canada Revenue Agency!)

MyClassNeeds takes the well-established principles of crowdfunding and adds the transparency and accountability often lacking in other crowdfunding efforts by ensuring all projects are vetted, costed and fulfilled (once they reach their funding goal). Every donor has access to full and detailed costing information for every project. As a donor, you’ll be notified when a project is funded, and when the materials have arrived at the school. Also, donors who pledge $50 or more discover thank-you notes in their mailboxes handwritten by students they’ve helped.

Current projects currently range from entrepreneurial design projects (such as a program for at-risk-youth that also doubles as a design studio and skateboard factory in Toronto), to making sure that kids with disabilities have the assistive technologies they might need, to creative concepts like the anti-bullying flag. As a reader of this blog, how about we get that anti-bullying flag fully funded today? Or join us at MyClassNeeds.ca and choose the project closest to your heart. Either way, let’s spread the word about this fantastic example of practical loving design thinking: it’s a great example of the fact that there isn’t a problem our civilization has that we can’t solve. Let’s start demonstrating that to our kids immediately.

Follow David Berman on Twitter: @davidberman

In celebration of our launch this week of the 2013 edition of Do Good Design, printed on 100% post-consumer papers, I'm sharing with you an excerpt of an interview conducted by Mohawk Papers' Allyson Van Houten. For the full interview please visit the Felt & Wire blog.

Allyson: Your book is ready for a reprint in what feels like a pretty short amount of time. Congratulations!  Why was it important for you to produce a printed edition of your book?

David: The future of civilization is our common design project. And as we now live in a time where everyone is a designer, we need to find a way to reach everyone with the message of where and how they fit in a sustainably designed future. Of course e-book distribution is rising, which is wonderful for strengthening universal access. Meanwhile, responsibly crafted paper continues to have many merits. Print provides expression, access, permanence, reach and focus not always available in electronic media.

Why did you choose to use Mohawk papers for the reprint?

We needed papers for this book with great surface qualities, high post-consumer waste content, FSC certification so we turned to our neighbours just across the St. Lawrence at Mohawk, not just for their expertise, but for their history and commitment to sustainable design. They were the first American commercial paper manufacturer to match 100% of their electricity with wind power renewable energy credits.

Tell us a little bit about why you chose Mohawk Options and Mohawk Everyday Digital.

We really wanted the feel of a hardcover book, but in a light and convenient airplane read. So for the interior, we sought out the vellum texture in a 100% post-consumer stock with strong opacity. We found all of that, without compromise, in Mohawk Options. For the cover we were seeking great performance for the embossment, the heavy red ink coverage, and the folding of the flaps that were added to this edition. Mohawk Everyday Digital was an excellent choice. We like the name too! Every day design and designers doing extraordinary things!

We’re working on a campaign in our studio and Ben, stuffing a letter into an envelope, asks me, “Why are #10 envelopes the size they are?” I answer without looking up. “Well, to perfectly hold a letter-sized sheet folded in three, of course.”

“Uh-huh. And why are letter-sized sheets 8.5 by 11 inches?”

Hmmm…Now that forced me into System 2 thinking (don’t know about System 2 thinking? If you design for good or evil, then the most important book you can read this year is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnemann). “I have no idea Ben, let’s find out...” As it turned out, the process of finding out about the history of paper lead us to thoughts about the future of paper consumption and waste.

So, why exactly is “U.S. Letter” exactly 8.5 by 11 inches? We have to go back over four hundred years, a time where it is said that North American forests were so thick that a squirrel could get from Niagara Falls to the Atlantic Ocean without touching the ground.

We also have to cross that ocean, to the Netherlands. The Dutch invented the two-sheet mold for papermaking in the 1660s. Apparently, the average maximum stretch of a vatman's arms was 44". In terms of depth, many molds were around 17" front-to-back because the laid lines and watermarks had to run from left to right. So, to maximize the efficiency of papermaking, the Dutch molded 44” x 17” sheets...which cut down nicely to eight 8.5" x 11" pieces of paper: just right to pen a personal request for more double salt licorice.

Now fast-forward a few hundred years to a time where machines, rather than people, were making most of the paper.

In 1921, American president Herbert Hoover’s Elimination of Waste in Industry program created the Committee on the Simplification of Paper Sizes, made up of printing industry reps and the Bureau of Standards.

The committee decided on a standard paper size in the interests of minimizing paper waste, and they stuck with the standard invented by the Dutch in order to help hand-made paper makers stay in business. (The committee actually standardized 17” x 22” as the basis for letter sheets, and 17” x 28” as the basis for “legal” sheets, which yields four annoying 8.5” x 14” sheets that lawyers love to mess us up with.)

Here in Canada in the 1970s, we did our best to leave the Americans alone with Imperial units. The Ontario government set the example of switching from Letter to the Metric A4 size, but gave up in the late 1980s at the same time that the Mulroney federal government bailed on metrication, and went back to U.S. Letter. The schism between what was available and in use outside government was too confusing and expensive to maintain. And so paper remains Imperial for the most part in Canada.

So, ironically, while the Dutch and the rest of the planet has long since moved on to measuring paper in the very logical metric units and grams per square metre and such, we Canadians find ourselves with our American neighbours, still confusing our clients and our staff with “lbs” and “basis weights” and “M’s” and “legal” and “#10 envelopes”.

So that licks the envelope question (sorry!)...however, of course, there is far more we can do today than could be done in Hoover’s day to guarantee paper sustainability and avoid wasting our precious forest resources. Society has entrusted us designers with conspicuous power over how paper is consumed in our society...which is why sustainability must continue to become how we roll as professionals.

For our part, I'll be releasing the 2013 edition of Do Good Design with publisher Peachpit/Pearson and the AIGA, and we’re proud to say that this time it will be printed on Mohawk Papers. We chose the papers for this book based on Mowhawk's high post-consumer waste content and FSC certifications...more news on that front really soon!

Google is blind. And deaf. And has severe cognitive challenges. And most online shopping begins with a Google search...or perhaps a search on Yahoo or Bing...or Siri.

So, aside from the many other powerful arguments for making your sites and your documents inclusive (doing the right thing, leaving no one behind, broadening reach, attracting the best personnel, fulfilling corporate social responsibility goals), it’s simply good business.

Structuring a site in a way that makes its content perceivable and understandable to people with substantial disabilities will also result in Google finding your content and ranking it higher.

For example, the same alternative text we add to images so that a screen reader can describe the content to someone who cannot see it, also is used by search engines to index that same content. The rigour we apply to heading levels to structure an accessible web page also suggests to a search engine the priority and context of our content.

Design is about making things work, often in an intriguing and delightful way. An accessible design is about making things work for everybody.

Here in Ontario, we live in the first jurisdiction in the world to legally mandate web accessibility not just for government sites, but for business sites, which is great for social justice. But considering how accessibility yields better ethical SEO (search engine optimization) it will prove beneficial for economic competitiveness as well.

So while the accessibility standards speak of how to accommodate all users, far better strategically is to delight all users...and communicators. So go ahead: delight Google. When we design for the extremes, everybody benefits.

We’re doing a lot of work at our studio these days making other people’s InDesign files into PDFs that are accessible to people with disabilities. A file came in this morning in which the designer had wrongly used hard hyphens to force the rag he desired. Of course he should have used discretionary hyphens instead. Using discretionary hyphens may have just been a matter of good form up until now, but for universal design it can affect whether the content is perceived correctly. Using hard hyphens when not appropriate is a fail for a screen reader because it changes how the word is read out loud. (If you're thinking such subtleties of accessibility only apply to those who don't see well, I'll explain in my next post how it's equally important for many with other disabilities and reasons including Google Search, perhaps your most frequent visitor!)

It’s both the old-school typographer and the accessibility consultant in me who’s frustrated by the lack of awareness over the use of proper hyphens, non-breaking spaces, and the like. When I’m teaching how to build accessible documents (shameless plug: join us at Carleton University in Ottawa, Feb. 22 or Hamilton, Feb 28. to learn this stuff) to designers or non-designers, it’s easy to open their eyes to these issues — but then they’re frustrated as to where to find such constructs on their computer keyboards.

Seems like it’s time to redesign the English keyboard. I’m not talking about replacing QWERTY: that’s another issue. I’m talking about having dedicated keys for these key parts of our editorial alphabet (including proper quotation marks!). The timing is perfect for an upgrade because the nature of the keyboard itself is mutating as the majority of mobile devices are moving their keyboards on-screen, while technologies like Swype anticipate our keystrokes. It’s the perfect time to regain these typographic keys that used to be found on every dedicated typesetting machine, from Monotype to the Editwriter 7500, before they were lost in the shift to desktop publishing.

One way to help accelerate the cultural shift towards universal design that is taking place this decade is to teach people to stop using Microsoft Word as if it’s a typewriter. Another is that if we are to succeed in bringing up the next generation in a world that habituates building properly structured documents (using styles, headings, proper typography, templates...) from the get-go, then we’d benefit from keyboard layouts that make it easier to do so.

Perhaps dedicated keys would even be the precursor to the evolution of the alphabet: a word-breaking hyphen deserves to have a different symbol than the hyphen we use in the midst of a compound word. And the thin space that used to differ in width from a word space, and that also ensured that “Dr.” and “Seuss” always remained on the same row of type, deserves to make a comeback as HTML increasingly finds its elegance.

So here’s to kick-starting a move back to these essential typographic details, for the good of aesthetics, of understanding, and of universal design. Here’s to the return of the discretionary hyphen key, and the thin space, and dedicated open and closing quotation marks.

What other characters do you think are most missing from the English keyboard? And which could we do without?

So friends, it’s 2013, and Joseph Kony is still at large. More likely than not, you hadn’t heard of Kony before 2012, and then this past year he came to your attention via the most rapidly viral social justice campaign in human history. The virality of this YouTube video itself was huge mainstream news worldwide on its own, accompanied by an excellent designed campaign of collateral: a great example of how we now live in a world where everyone is a designer, a communicator, a message. And yet....

Number of views for Kony 2012 video in 2012: 96,033,780
Number of warlords named Joseph Kony arrested in 2012: 0

And yet, here we are in 2013 and the failure of the goal of that video (to arrest Kony by December 31, 2012) did not even make a blip in mainstream media. The most viewed do good video in human history, which itself pushed the bounds of the technology and reach of design for the social good, yielded unprecedented good intentions and outpouring of interest around the world...and yet, for whatever reason, failed to deliver on its stated objective.

What do we learn from this?  We have to stop being naive, both as designers and consumers, that messaging alone can save the world. As we embrace the power of design to help create our best civilization yet, we must persist and follow through, not just with graphic design, but with the design thinking and tactics that will finish what we start. We must be relentless in the pursuit of a better future.

In the film Casablanca, Rick says to Laszlo, “We all try. You succeed."

Designers can be unstoppable. This year, be Laslzo. Be unstoppable.

New Year’s resolution for 2013: Don’t just try to do good...get it done.

As political change ripples through the Middle East, it’s a great time to remind ourselves of how far we’ve come (and how far we’ve left to go) in the quest for equal rights for both genders.

Which is why it’s been especially delightful to complete remote judging of Poster For Tomorrow [posterfortomorrow.org], a remarkable annual design competition whose winners for this year’s theme of gender equality were announced earlier in December.


Submissions, open to designers around the world, were due by 10 July 2012; two phases of judging took place over 50 days, between July 20 and September 10.

Co-founder and organizer Herve Matine, of Paris, France, has an ambitious approach: have 50 judges each consider over 3,000 posters. But that’s the Poster For Tomorrow formula. Every year, Herve organizes this competition with the goal of empowering designers to aid global social justice — so I was very proud to be asked to jury.


My practical fears of having to judge 3,000 entries were calmed when I saw the online judging interface: perhaps the best I’ve seen. And he mitigates the weakness caused by a lack of discussion amongst the judges by allowing us to see what others have chosen.

Judging from the over 3,000 submissions, the power of posters as vehicles of social change appears to be alive and well in the hands and minds of the next generation of designers. Amongst the entries were true gems of creativity, colour, typography, passion, and brilliance, including many messages that instantly motivate and educate. These designs reassure us that the march to true gender equality as part of our common belief for a just society is in good hands.


The top 10 posters were published in a book and exhibited around the world on Poster for Tomorrow Day (December 10). The top 100 posters earned a free copy of the catalogue. In addition, 10 designers (as chosen by the jury) were awarded a subscription to the graphic design magazine Etapes, and 10 designs become part of the permanent collection of some of the world’s top design museums including our Canadian Museum for Human Rights. The other museums: Center for the Study of Political Graphics (US), Dansk Plakatmuseum (Denmark), Design Museum Gent (Belgium), Graphic Design Museum (The Netherlands), Lahti Poster Museum (Finland), Les Arts Decoratifs (France), Museum für Gestaltung, (Switzerland), Wilanow Poster Museum (Poland), Victoria and Albert Museum (UK).  

So whether you’re interested in taking part in next year’s competition, or seeing the amazing winning work, visit the website.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to share your examples of design doing good, please contribute to our Do Good Flickr feed.

As I write this blog, our friends to the south are still recounting ballots in several states, with lawyers poised to fight over what voters intended.

For those of you who’ve read my book Do Good Design, you know that I believe the most influential piece of design in my lifetime has been the horrible information design of the Palm Beach County ballot of the U.S. presidential election in 2000, and you’ve seen the examples I show of how it hasn’t gotten any better since.

As related in Do Good Design, the most influential piece of information design in my lifetime may very well be the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County for the November 2000 U.S. presidential election. The number of votes mistakenly cast for independent Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore, due to the misleading layout, was well in excess of George W. Bush’s certified margin of victory in Florida, and enough to result in Bush winning the presidency nationally. The poor design of this ballot is therefore likely responsible for the failure of the United States to sign the Kyoto Accord on climate change, the 2003 invasion of Iraq in search of weapons of mass destruction, and a long list of controversial White House decisions during the eight years that followed.


AIGA’s Design for Democracy has worked with the U.S. government to clean up the ballot mess. As a result of its efforts, in June 2007, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission issued voluntary guidelines for the effective use of design in administering federal elections. However, in the 2008 election, its recommendations were only reflected in the ballot design of perhaps six states, and it is still unclear what effect the recommendations had on the 2012 vote, but here's an example of an issue with an electronic ballot used in the 2012 election. The U.S. continues to have thousands of different ballot designs, with varied technologies, for electing one president.


Voters should be provided with a consistently formatted ballot, created by information design experts. In Canada, as in most Western democracies (let alone in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, which ironically provide their citizens clearer ballots that the U.S. does), anything other than a professional and consistent national ballot design would be an affront. It is odd that, by law, the United States Food and Drug Administration requires a standard format for nutritional facts on every one of thousands of food package designs, while the U.S. government fails to legislate the use of a standardized, well-designed ballot and voting procedures across its 51 states and districts.


South Africa got it right the first time in its 1994 election. The vast majority had not voted before and a substantial portion of its citizens were illiterate. A simple ballot including candidate photos worked well. The influence of design on election outcomes does not stop at the ballot box. Candidates spend most of their war chests on ads. Many of these messages are oversimplified and intentionally misleading, cunningly combining pictures and words out of context. Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield admits, “Political advertising is a stain on our democracy. It’s the artful assembling of nominal facts into hideous, outrageous lies.”

Sadly, what we take for granted in Canada (one clear ballot design for the entire country, easily created, easily completed, easily counted, easily audited) is quite different from the hodgepodge we see in the U.S. For a country that has so often led the world at developing delightfully simple interfaces (read Apple) and efficient standards that are adopted worldwide through creative destruction, one is left wondering what powers stand to benefit from a system of unnecessary complexity and advertising of often-intentional confusion.

If fact, for the first time ever, the U.S. election was audited by international observers from the European Union and Asia concerned that the election would not be run fairly.

So how can we get the U.S. to get the design thinking it needs, which will result in a better world for all? We’ve got two years till the midterm elections. If you believe that design can create a better world then let’s figure this out: there are few things more influential to the future of human civilization than how the world’s most powerful federation is governed.

People often ask what I think is the next big thing in design, and many expect I'll talk about a colour scheme, a typeface, or a material. Ten years ago when I first started speaking at design conferences I was saying that the next big thing would be the environment, and the transition that design would take to embrace our culpability in a growing environmental and consumerist crisis. Though entertained, many thought I was crazy, and so I would spend over 20 minutes convincing people that there was a link between graphic design, consumerism and the environmental crisis.

Today, of course, green is mainstream, and if not how we roll in every design studio then at least it’s a theme in every design school and most conferences. In fact, sustainability has reached the point where we’ve just established our global jury for Icograda’s global sustainability standard, but I’ll tell you more on that later.

This blog is about the next big thing and that will absolutely be universal design.

When we design for the extremes, everyone benefits. And being the first generation of designers who have the option to publish everything digitally, this also represents the most profound opportunity in history for enabling content for persons with disabilities. I think more people have been liberated in the last 30 years through information technology than all the wars and revolutions in human history.

For me, making online documents accessible represents the most pragmatic example of how design can do good in our times.

I’m often asked why web accessibility matters so much, and why people should care; why people should bother making sure their web presences and documents are accessible. In Ontario today the simple answer is, legislation tells us we have to. Ontario (and thus Canada) leads the world in being the first jurisdiction that has passed regulations saying that not just government but the private sector and NGO sectors must update their Web presence to publish to minimum international standards of Web accessibility.

Shameless plug: I’ve put together a one-day crash course that takes you through why Web accessibility matters, what the major issues are, and how to make your clients’ web presences and documents accessible.

We focus on WCAG 2.0 Level A and AA standards because that’s the standard that the Canadian Government has chosen for its new standard, that’s the standard that provinces like Ontario’s AODA call for, and it’s the standard the governments around the world are choosing as well. When you learn this, you’ll learn the standard that everyone in the world is heading towards.

The most important point I want to share is that accessibility matters to everyone. When we know how to make content accessible for the extremes, and we do it well, we make content more usable for everyone.

A more usable site is going to make it more likely that your entire audience is going to connect with your messages. And that includes Google: Google is the most frequent visitor to your site, and Google has severe visual, auditory, and cognitive impairments. When you follow the accessibility standards, all search engines will understand and index your content and your site structure better.

If you can get your audience to support themselves by going to the site, you can drive down your support costs, as well as having more satisfied customers. Why wouldn’t you want that?

I really enjoy teaching this stuff: it’s fascinating and educational for both people in management, as well as IT professionals. I find people come out of this course excited, motivated, and entertained. Most important they’re educated, and the information sticks.

If you’re a designer, an IT professional, a programmer, a designer, a webmaster, anyone with a stake in the bottom line of your organization, please join me at one of our upcoming events on my seven-city tour in Ontario.

We can design in a way that leaves no one behind. Including designers who risk missing one of the best opportunities of a lifetime to create a better world while delivering highly profitable work.

So join me. Visit here for a complete list of scheduled seminars, including our November 19 event at Design City 2012 in Toronto (your registration includes free admission to all three days of Design City and Print World)  and there’s a discount for RGD and GDC members for all these events as well.

For as long as I can recall, I’ve wanted to design a postage stamp.

My dad taught me his love of stamp collecting before I was six, and I went pretty deep with it. At 10, I was poring over differences between intaglio and rotogravure printing, and sleuthing perforation, inking and watermark differences in old scraps of government-issued paper from the 1800s.

In fact one of the reasons I became a graphic designer and typographer was very likely my nerdy amazement for postage stamps.

Someday perhaps I’ll be fortunate enough to join that elite of designers who have been commissioned to create a postage stamp. But I still got to design a stamp — and so can the rest of you. In this age where everyone is a designer, Canada Post has released its Picture Postage app (for iPhone, Android and Blackberry); every Canadian can now design their own stamp.

My niece Rachel and nephew Ami are becoming Canadian citizens this year. My brother and I were both born in Ottawa, however he moved to San Diego and both his kids are Americans. He recently decided to take advantage of the opportunity to have his kids get their Canadian citizenship. During their most recent visit to Canada, I happened to snap a photo with my smartphone of my niece signing her citizenship papers. I then promptly forgot about the photo along with all the other wonderful pictures on my phone that I never get around to sharing.

And then the Picture Postage app crossed my path. Eager to try it out, I went flipping through my phone for a photo and found the image of my niece. What a perfect gift to surprise her with when her citizenship comes through: a sheet of Canadian stamps in her honour! (Did I just ruin the surprise?)


So now that we all wield the power to publish designs with the Canada brand, who decides what themes, fonts and colour schemes are allowed to be made into a ‘Canada’ stamp? What will our government tolerate? Montreal student protests? Naked babies? CUPW slogans? Instructions for invading Flin Flon? What would happen if someone designs a stamp with caricatures of the Pope or the Prophet Mohammed? Visuals are powerful — and that’s the challenge. We can communicate images that celebrate family and accomplishment and the best of human values. We can urge people to create a better society. Or we can use images to hurt, to deceive, and to manipulate. And as new technologies create new possibilities, we must keep in mind that just because we can doesn’t mean we should.

I wanted to see the list of things you can't put on a stamp. So, I got in touch with Canada Post’s Sally McMullen, product manager for Picture Postage. She tells me that ours is one of only a few national postal agencies that are crowdsourcing stamp design, and that the program will expand substantially next month.

It turns out that every image is vetted and scrutinized. No dictators, national flags, logos or copyrighted images, etc. are allowed. Once a week or so, Canada Post receives an image that requires a careful well-documented, approve-or-reject decision.

As well, Sally tells me that equally challenging for Canada Post designer Stéphane Huot was the development of the simple designs for the standing frames that surround the crowdsourced’s artwork. A dozen new frames are coming out November 5, 2012. We’ll see what Canada Post comes up with — there’ll be customizable photo postcards and greeting cards. For me, however, the postage stamp itself, with its iconic role in society and graphic design over the last quarter millennium, is where the democratization is so notable.


Meanwhile I’ll wait (days not weeks!) for the stamps featuring my niece to arrive, and also patiently hope that someday Canada Post will ask me to design a stamp that celebrates design for all.