COVID-19 outreach
COVID-19 outreach, 2020–2021
San Francisco COVID Command Center
In 2020, I was reassigned by the City and County of San Francisco to work on COVID-19 outreach materials.
I designed flyers, posters, social media graphics and long-form booklets that were made available publicly on the City’s website and printed for distribution around San Francisco.
The City of SF’s COVID Emergency Response Communications won the 2021 SF Design Week award for best Civic Design.
I joined the Joint Information Center team three months into the pandemic. One of my first tasks was codifying the established design practices into a style guide, which we continuously updated as needed.
I built paragraph styles in InDesign that improved efficiency and consistency, replacing ad hoc solutions for individual designs.
All materials were produced in four languages—English, Spanish, Chinese and Filipino. Select materials were also translated into Arabic, Russian and Vietnamese.
Practically every item was intended for both print and digital uses. This meant that our 32-page Testing, Isolation and Quarantine guide was laid out to be printed as a book and distributed to testing sites in the community, and also that each page reference (e.g. “see page 3”) was hyperlinked to the intended destination.
The City took out an ad in the San Francisco Chronicle that included a map calling out vaccination sites at well-known locations throughout the community.
Most messaging was also posted to social media on a variety of channels, meaning that I had to adapt the designs to multiple digital formats.
We created posters with vaccination information targeted to the Tenderloin neighborhood of SF, known as “the TL” to its residents, which had relatively low vaccine uptake. The posters used the same blue background and familiar rounded corners of the City’s primary design, but a different font and secondary color to distinguish it as its own campaign. We created posters in the four languages spoken with highest frequency in the Tenderloin: English, Chinese, Spanish and Arabic.
[San Franciscan Rosie Cornwell] saw multilingual information posted everywhere advising residents to protect themselves from the virus and information about free testing sites. “There was a lot of information not just online but printed on the street,” Ms. Cornwell said.
— A Stark Divide in California’s Surge, NYT, Jan. 11, 2021
Passing a storefront in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood in summer 2021, I spotted this parody of the designs I’d been working on for over a year.
I felt proud that our work was so recognizable that the vehement socialist who made this reached for its visual language to create this call to action, mocking though it may be.
Design credit goes, presumably, to a member of Queerious Labs, the occupant of the building where I saw the poster.
