2020 was not the way anyone expected to start a new decade. The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed how people worked and worked together. My freelance client base of nonprofits and small businesses were forced to reallocate their budgets towards essential services and my workload dwindled in the process. This isn’t a sob story, however, because with the extra time I now had with sheltering in place I volunteered my time as a designer for programs in need under Patagonia’s Action Works grant program.
With classrooms shuttered, for almost all of 2020, educators needed to pivot to an online method of teaching — fast. I helped Ventura County Farm to School adapt their in-classroom curriculum for K-2 students for at-home learning by helping them create cohesive lessons in an App called Seesaw. I fleshed out their Harvest of the Month programs visuals, as well as supporting them through a few other graphic needs. The curriculum is bilingual in Spanish and English and two sets of graphics and illustrations were made for all 12 lessons.
Just like schools conferences also had to make a quick turn to online platforms for their pre-scheduled events.
The Center for Creative Land Recycling tapped me to illustrate a landscape for their now online conference where users could navigate to the speakers by exploring different sections of the illustration.
Kitchen Table Advisors is a Bay Area nonprofit helping farmers and ranchers in Northern California hit new business milestones. They prioritize working with communities historically excluded from resources and recognition within our food system.
Kitchen Table Advisors and I worked on data visualization of a few tables and flowcharts, as well as an infographic for a new training site they were building out for internal education. I had a little leeway graphically but worked within their branding and helped them polish up a deluge of data into far more digestible formats for their end-users.