ERA Centennial Convention
Branding
Visual Design for the ERA Centennial Convention, a joint effort between the Young Feminist Party, Colombia Law School, ERA Coalition, National Organization of Women, and more in Seneca Falls, NY celebrating the Equal Rights Amendment's 100th anniversary.
The ERA Centennial Convention ran July 21-22, 2023, in Seneca Falls, marking 100 years since Alice Paul first introduced the Equal Rights Amendment. Organized by Generation Ratify, Equal Rights Action, and Columbia Law School’s ERA Project, it brought together activists, scholars, and advocates to look back on a century of organizing and figure out what full constitutional recognition of the ERA actually takes from here. We held it in the First Presbyterian Church of Seneca Falls, the same building where Paul unveiled the ERA in 1923, which made the history hard to ignore even before anyone spoke.
Visual and Brand Design
As the visual and brand designer, I owned everything attendees would actually see: social graphics, printed programs, banners, workshop materials. The identity needed to hold two things at once, the weight of a hundred years of organizing and the sense that attendees were part of what came next, not just there to observe it.
I built the design around circles, a nod to the ripple effect of a century of organizing, and to the original ‘ERA YES’ campaign button. Archival photos of suffrage parades and ERA demonstrations sit in the backgrounds of a lot of the materials, and the green-and-white palette comes straight from the suffragist movement, so the visual line from 1923 to 2023 is pretty literal. Type stayed bold enough to read from across a room but plain enough to hold up on a printed handout.
The promo materials for the Reimagining Gender Justice workshop series, which ran in the weeks before the convention, had to represent a genuinely wide coalition: queer activists, women of color, constitutional scholars, people working on gender justice globally. I wanted someone who’d been organizing for decades and someone showing up for the first time to look at the same poster and both feel like it was made for them.
Accessibility
Accessibility mattered as much as aesthetics here. Signage needed high contrast to actually help people navigate the church and surrounding venues, and the printed schedules had to lay out two days of programming clearly enough that nobody missed a session hunting for information. The large banners did double duty as wayfinding and as a way to make the space feel unified rather than like a church with some posters taped up.
