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 abysmal, and there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
The graphic design that the government produces is its own interesting story. When branches of the government have committed to good graphic design it has been very popular. NASA is a good example, but somewhere along the line good graphic design was seen as excess or waste.
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
I feel like my biggest solution that I advocated for internally, was to shift away from posting to the feed, and towards posting graphics to stories. We are spreading 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.
The Outcome