Montgomery Township, NJ
In this project, I describe my role and the challenges of graphic design for government clients.
The Challenges
Working with government clients is tricky. Nearly everything is short notice, communication is fragmented, and decisions pass through multiple layers of approval, often without clear ownership between departments.
Government design is often treated as an afterthought, with good design perceived as excess rather than essential communication.
Projects are of critical importance one month, and then completely forgotten by the next.
Often, we are asked to promote things that actively hurt the engagement metrics on social media, like very niche events that don’t have an organic target audience. After coming home from work there is only so many folks that will show up to a council meeting about the township’s budget. Storm and construction updates are important, but most of us are probably going to scroll past them, not liking or commenting.
The Solutions
The solution that I advocated for internally, was to shift away from posting to the feed, and towards posting graphics to stories. We can spread the message there and don’t have to worry so much about likes or comments.
I love doing work on brands, and this client loved sub-brands. Two are displayed on this page: Montgomery at Work and Montgomery Innovates. My goal with these sub-brands was to stay pretty close to the main brand, while creating elements that can stand on their own. Typically, multiple options were presented to the client, like shown above with the Montgomery Innovates project. These concepts were often made in just a few hours, shared with internal management, and then sent to client review by the next day. So, the turnaround was very quick.
I’ve worked on a large variety of projects for this client creating: social media graphics, physical collateral, sub-brand branding, email marketing, newsletters, signage, and other small one-off projects.
This is a challenging client, but I always worked to add value and improve the graphics that they needed over time. I have worked with this client for the last four years. We have helped them promote community events that were very successful and we have communicated important updates to their citizens.
As part of a team, the engagement has grown by 220% in our time working with this client.
The Outcome