Partners in spreading End of Year Cheer

Every year Fuse Washington’s Development team, Communications team, and myself collaborate to create Fuse’s end of year card that gets sent out to all our major donors. We discuss major themes from the past year of our work and how to engender hope and engagement looking forward. The communications team write a few different poems and I draft a few different design concepts for those poems and we come to a consensus of what we feel is the strongest pair.

2026

This last year has been hard politically for the nation. However, locally we accomplished a lot and highlighted that taking action and having hope do make a difference and that is very much worth celebrating. We wanted to offer up a fun and playful design as a bit of respite from the heaviness of the year.

I designed a bouquet of confetti and color to create a bright, dynamic and playful cover. For the interior of the card, since I didn’t have the numbers 2026 to anchor my design to I used the left alignment of the type to create a strong axis to design from. I created the 2026 graphic in Illustrator using pathfinder and the rest of the artwork and typography I created in InDesign.

Big Ideas, Real Impact.

2025

We wanted to acknowledge the heaviness of the moment, it was a presidential election year that was disappointing for us as a progressive organization. It was also important to encourage our members that now more than ever, we needed to focus on hope and not giving up the fight.

I created a design and artwork serious in tone but also beautiful and sincere. I used a more serious color palette but made sure that it wasn’t too heavy by adding in some blush pinks and creamy off whites. I created the paint strokes in Photoshop working with Kyle’s brushes and layer masks to achieve the layered texture.

Big Ideas, Real Impact.

2024

With the presidential election right around the corner, Fuse had had an all hands on deck year. We helped with big wins in congress and the south west and eastern Washington. For this end of year card we wanted to really lean into celebrating that in a fun and playful way with the multifaceted multicolored stars and very colorful palette. I created the stars and layout in InDesign.