Spring 2023 - Remote
Abortion Design Day
A day of collaboration to provide free and open design resources for the abortion access movement.
The Main Event
Graphics and design used in communicating about abortion access often don’t reflect the realities of people who have abortions, provide them, or organize to defend access to them.
We’re hoping to change that.
We’re inviting activists, designers, artists, storytellers and photographers to come together to generate as many open source graphics and design assets for activists, journalists, organizers, and other communicators on reproductive freedom. We take inspiration from grassroots efforts to create and collect inclusive stock photography in reproductive rights and care, and in STEM.
Our kickoff design day was held on May 2nd, 2020, with dozens of domain experts, designers, user experience researchers, and other volunteers coming together to define the shape of the problem, design needs and prompts, and identify the resources we can collect and create to support ongoing design work.
Our next Design Day event will be held in 2023, likely in the spring; sign up to join us.
When
Spring 2023
Our next design weekend will be held this spring, on a date to be determined - sign up to be notified
Full Details +
The Mission
Art can help us tell more informative, representative, and inspiring stories.
We seek to come together as a community to create art and design assets for the public domain that communicates the realities, emotions, experiences, and issues that surround abortion. We hope resources like a library of free stock images, or templates for print materials, will provide much-needed assets to organizers, journalists, researchers, storytellers, and writers appropriate for works inviting the public to learn more about abortion access.
Tentative Spring 2023 Focus - Templates for Print Materials
Abortion access organizations and activists use print materials to help distribute accurate, up-to-date, private information.
Flyers, stickers, and zines, oh my! How can we together make it easier for every abortion support group to make their own effective, accessible, localized print materials?
Watch this space for finalized details about the design prompt, and supporting background resources, for our next event.
Our May 2020 Event Focus - Stock Images
Stock header images on articles about abortion are too often inaccurate and stigmatizing.
Too many excellent works of investigative journalism on abortion access often end up topped off with ex: a coat hanger, CGI fetus, or full term pregnant person because the publication doesn’t know where or how to select more representative images.
These images are often not accurate to the experience of abortion, and can be misleading. For example, many only feature white people, only presume women have abortions, or show people who are not at the gestation of someone who typically has an abortion.
These images can also be stigmatizing. For example clothes hanger imagery, while referencing and often used as a symbolic stand-in for the history of unsafe abortion, does not reflect the most common experiences of self-managed abortion today. These depictions can mislead and frighten people out of finding accurate information.
We worked at this event to bring together subject matter experts working in abortion access, artists, and designers we can together generate better graphics that add to the impact of journalism and other written works on the topic of abortion.
Sponsorships
This event is entirely volunteer-run, and depends on in-kind donations to provide the resources our attendees need to keep their creativity flowing. If you think you can help us with software licensing donations, hosting fees, please reach out and we’ll thank you by featuring you as a sponsor.