Design Solutions by George Miller

Branding suite
Logos for 10th Anniversary
Logo for Win the Future
Supplementary color palette
Custom illustrations

Hustle, the communications platform, celebrates its 10th anniversary in 2026. They got in touch to ask for a branding boost with special logos, brand colors, and supplementary assets like brand shapes and illustrations to carry them through the year.

My priority for this project: making something useful, that Hustle's team could use throughout the year on their website, in social media, and ads. I wanted to provide flexible assets they could upload to Canva or Google Docs and use with or without my help.

More specifically, we discussed:

a lightweight "sub-brand" identity, complementary and additive to Hustle's existing brand (without the need for a lengthy brand guide)
a looser, more playful style to add to the celebratory mood
emphasizing the platform's strengths, like tech support and all-in-one tools, as well as Hustle's progressive roots
imagery like a ballot box, checkmark, and Hustle's recognizable flag

I started with several logo concepts, quickly aligning on two variations on the "flag" theme. One used two overlapping chat bubbles to evoke a rippling flag, and is paired with the primary Hustle logo to make a lockup that can be used all year long.

The other was a specific request for a badge-size variant for email signatures. Hustle's team has long used the small flag logo as a signoff with different color schemes and variations for different holidays, so this would fit nicely into readers' expectations. The friendly 10-pointed star shape would become an additional asset useful for backgrounds, borders, and negative space.

For “Win the Future” — a promotional pricing structure for political clients in a midterm election year — I first pitched two concepts, including an angular “ribbon” logo and a “sunrise” logo. We agreed the ribbon concept stood out more.

The final Win the Future logo evokes progress (the upward, forward arrow), victory (the checkmark in the W), and activism (the brush font, a slightly modified Tomarik Brush). Here, too, I was able to pull out the starburst background and make it a reusable asset for year-round designs. Finally, the curved ribbon pairs nicely with the ribbon-like illustrations you'll see below.

I also created an extended brand palette for this anniversary year, building on the muted, light tones of the existing Hustle brand with three brighter, bolder colors. They can play well in any combination, and particularly with the primary Hustle purple.

Finally, I created a handful of illustrations and brand shapes: elements that could be reused in Canva or other client-created designs, and in a style that could accommodate new illustrations as the year went on.

I started by pitching two distinct approaches:

Each set highlighted different strengths of the Hustle brand. Ultimately, we decided the ribbon-like “Stars and Stripes” illustration suite would be more flexible at different scales, and built out a few additional assets, including star shapes and ribbons to act as dividers and all-purpose design elements.

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logos
templates
illustrations
custom icons
type
color

The Art League has been serving artists and art-lovers in the Alexandria, Virginia area for seven decades.

In 2025, they opened two new classroom spaces after a heroic fundraising effort to "Keep The Art League in Alexandria." They asked me to help with a visual identity for the big grand opening event!

The event logo used the shapes of the two new classroom venues (Slaters Annex and Muse Studios), along with letter shapes evoking construction and a painted heart to express thanks. It also incorporated the same paintbrush motif we had used throughout the fundraising campaign.

The large-scale poster advertising the event used more paint splotches and playful imagery to invite folks to join the fun:

Zinc Collective's Democratic Talent Pool helps connect talented campaign workers with the campaigns who need them, providing hiring managers with curated lists of resumes.

In the summer of 2024, they needed to reach out to campaign staffers, to get them to join the Pool before their positions ended after Election Day.

Ahead of that signup campaign, I helped Zinc refresh the Democratic Talent Pool brand with new digital assets including:

custom animated icons
an impact infographic
animated calls-to-action for social
testimonial templates for the social media campaign

The Democratic Talent Pool brand didn't need a complete do-over, only a few additional assets to help it stand apart in the signup campaign and provide the Zinc team with flexibility to communicate about the Pool in a variety of media.

Those additional assets included the images and icons you see here, as well as a new badge logo and an animated wave shape — a subtle, flexible nod to the idea of "pool" that could be used for image backgrounds, email headers, and the Pool landing page Zinc created in Hubspot.

What is a “brand refresh,” anyway? Brand refreshes can spring from a lot of different causes. In this case, the Democratic Talent Pool had an upcoming campaign they knew would need additional, flexible assets to bring to life.

When you find you no longer have the right tools to communicate about your brand in the way you want, that's a sign it's time to consider a brand refresh.

In my experience, that kind of realization happens months to two years after a full rebranding process, and can look like:

a slide deck template that doesn't work with the kinds of presentation your team is making
web pages that need new types of imagery not covered in your brand guidelines
social images that are stale, repetitive, and not as flexible as your content requires

If that sounds like something you'd like help thinking through, drop a line and let's talk.

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7 responsive web pages
Editable by client
Avada and Wordpress
Custom CSS
Custom imagery

DigiDems trains, mentors, and embeds digital strategy and social media experts on Democratic campaigns.

Ahead of their recruitment for the 2026 elections, they needed a redesigned website — with a more modern, mobile-friendly appearance.

I had previously worked to refresh the DigiDems visual identity in 2025, so this was also an opportunity to incorporate that brand refresh — including new illustrations, brand shapes, icons, accent font, and color guidance.

Before work began, we met to align on the most important strategic goals:

A polished site following the DigiDems brand and fitting a website by and for digital professionals
Editable by the client, with reusable blocks and flexibility for new and updated content
Providing a smooth experience for first-time visitors, especially potential DigiDems applicants landing on the Careers page

See the live site at DigiDems.com →

First things first: What platforms and frameworks would we use for the new site? A site redesign offers a chance to reevaluate choices you may have made years ago that you don't need to be stuck with anymore.

However, in this case, my research and conversations with the DigiDems team showed that their current framework, Avada, was still the best option for the new site. I based that decision on a balance of our three priorities: design, editability, and performance. (A “pixel-perfect” site your client can't update themselves isn't actually meeting their needs.)

That said, one drawback of website builders like Avada or Elementor is that your site can start to look the same as every other website out there. That's a necessary tradeoff for a backend editor that team members can use without fear of breaking anything.

And we can remedy that inflexibility with custom CSS. Writing our own CSS (style sheets) allows us to take reusable “blocks” of content within the builder and make them our own.

That custom CSS is used throughout the site, but you can see it most clearly in the branded shapes, like on the angled call-to-action buttons, the wave-shape dividers, and clipped corners on things like the mobile menu, below, or the team member bios, above.

All those CSS fixes add up to a site that feels totally DigiDems while still using many off-the-shelf options.

Throughout the site, I made many other decisions to balance “fancy” design choices with flexibility. Of course, that means frequent conversations with the DigiDems team to learn what they'd be updating most and what would be most useful to them.

That's why the home page could be more design-forward, where the overall structure of the page won't need to change much. But for pages that will have more frequent edits and additions, I wanted to make it more straightforward. So, for example, adding a new team member is as simple as duplicating a content block from the library.

I built a timeline together with DigiDems based on their deadline for publishing the new site (the Monday before applications opened). Working backward from there, I suggested a cadence of page drafts from me and feedback from them.

Initial mockups (as .jpg images): With the caveat that you can never exactly recreate mockups once you're in the website builder, starting from that shared understanding of your goal for the site is an important step. And I think we ended up quite close to the original sketches!
mobile homepage draft: I wanted to start with the homepage, as the most design-intensive page and one that used most of the types of content blocks we'd need to build. In other words, by doing some of the higher-profile, harder work first, we'd have an opportunity to align before building out remaining pages.
finalize homepage, including desktop version
Draft and finalize other pages
Final pre-launch testing and design tweaks
Launch!
Write documentation to help DigiDems team make changes to content

All told, and not counting the break for the holidays, this represented about two and a half months of work.

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web design
social graphics
motion graphics
custom icons
infographics
digital ads
emails
templates

For the 2022 midterm elections, I was proud to pitch and then successfully execute a #TeamTurnout resource portal housing all of Progressive Turnout Project's voter contact work on one site. My goal was to give all our team members and volunteers access to branded, trusted materials no matter where they were:

Training materials for canvassers across the country
Well-researched voter guides with detailed, trustworthy information on options for voters in 11 states
A resource library of more than 100 fact-checked images with state-specific reminders, for volunteers to save and post on their own networks

For the #TeamTurnout project, three design considerations guided my choices:

Flexibility: I began building out the resource library in the spring, even knowing the site and associated programs wouldn't launch until September. I started with highly modular, flexible templates, knowing that every state is just a little different — and they love to throw in last-minute changes every time.

Clarity: Always important in design, but frequently lacking in civic design especially. For partisan messages, I stuck to memorable slogans and clear endorsements. For voter information messages, I made clear the range of options available to voters without getting bogged down in excessive detail. (That detail was waiting on the associated state-specific landing page.)

Colors: I decided early on that #TeamTurnout should be a distinct sub-brand for two reasons. One, existing Progressive Turnout Project branding would have prevented many of our nonpartisan partners from promoting the toolkit. Two — and this is just a suspicion I have — I think many voters tune out the red-and-blue imagery around Election Day.

For Hustle, the communications platform, I designed this digital-only user guide designed to look good on screens, be legible at any size, and to seamlessly flow from page to page.

This site is made of hand-built HTML and CSS, with lots of .svg and .jpg and .png images — in other words, no frameworks or CMS. My priorities: quick load times, accessibility, and a unique look. Feel free to poke around in the source files!

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reports
business cards
flyers
brochures
mailers
postcards

The Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park built an On-Ramp space at mHUB in Chicago, for future tenants of the park to get a running start. During construction, they reached out to get some designs to bring the space to life.

I designed these wall panels to give visitors a preview of the park's progress, the site's history, and more details about quantum science. They use IQMP's blues and arrows motifs, along with dotted paths, collage-style photos, and dynamic cut-out shapes to trace a story for donors and elected officials.

The panels were printed on sturdy, textured wallpaper material, cut to specifications, and installed directly in the hallways between labs.

For Netroots Nation 2026, Hustle's booth became Camp Hustle, complete with turf, lawn chairs, a cardboard fire — and these vintage-style postcards, which folks could grab or even send home from Philly.

The brief asked for light references to the Hustle brand, which included the radio tower in the background, chat bubble under "Camp," and the camp-adjacent emojis within the letters.

The background is a digital collage from various public-domain photos of U.S. landscapes, and we added a Netroots stamp to make it a worthwhile keepsake.

In spring 2020, the voter contact organization I worked at had a problem. With door-to-door canvassing paused due to a global pandemic, how could we get photos of our voter contact work, while getting voters the info they needed?

The #VotersOf2020 cards met several needs:

They were personal: It's hard to get good photos of door-to-door canvassing, but using the info card as a simple prop helped tell the story.
They were functional: Important, thoroughly fact-checked voting information for 17 different states was on the back of each card, so voters could keep the cards on their fridge (or wherever) to reference after the photo.
They were flexible: With cards printed months in advance, I knew some voting rules were subject to change. I kept the most basic information on the printed card, like major registration deadlines and voting options, while leaving the details for the accompanying web page.

Good civic design is more important than ever, when voters can choose multiple methods for voting and bad actors spread disinformation about what's allowed. Unfortunately, state governments often create dense, legalistic, and inaccessible materials. These cards, and their accompanying digital guides, streamlined the decision-making process to make a voter's menu of options crystal clear.

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I design lots of different things, including:

Branding: From a full, formal rebrand, to a lighter "refresh" to ease your pain points, or even a package of supplementary assets like an illustration suite or custom icon set
Digital: landing pages, digital ads, ActBlue pages, PDF guides and reports, social media images
Print: Walk lit, one-pagers, reports, event flyers, mailers, postcards, signage (yes, including yard signs)
Templates: For you and your team to create polished, branded materials on your own
Motion graphics
Merch
Infographics
Anything else — let's talk!

I don’t have a particular style that I always stick to, other than trying to keep things accessible — that is, keeping it easy to understand and prioritizing communication over flashiness.

I work primarily with Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. I have a marketing background, so I'm familiar with the messages and strategies you'll need to reach your most important voters, donors, and volunteers.

I've also worked with universities, real estate firms, small businesses, and you-name-it — so don't hesitate to reach out, regardless of your industry.

That’s OK! That part is my job, not yours. Your job is to tell me what problem the design can solve: a report that appeals to X audience, some merch that makes an event feel like Y, social media templates for situation Z.

From there, I’ll propose a few solutions, we’ll agree on the direction, price, and timeline, and it’s off to the races.

Adobe software (especially Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, and After Effects).

Figma, Canva, Google Slides, and Google Docs.

Pencil and paper, HTML and CSS, needle and thread.

My DSLR (sometimes) and my phone camera (often).

In other words, anything and everything that’s useful for the task at hand. Rough sketches on real paper can be really great for quickly aligning on an approach in the middle of a meeting!

I support trans lives, Black lives, DEI, immigrant rights, the right to clean air and water, and the right to bodily autonomy — including abortion care and gender-affirming care.

It's important to me to share that publicly, so clients understand who they're working with and what I prioritize as a person and a business. I want to work with people that share these values.

Without getting into the environmental (1, 2) and human (1, 2) costs of these technologies, here's an opinion from a designer's point of view: There's no benefit to me, or my clients, in using “A.I.” tools to generate designs, and I don't use it in my work. These models spit out generic visuals without understanding what is happening or applying strategic thinking. When it comes to your brand and visual identity, there's no value in looking the same as everyone else.

For that reason, I guarantee thoughtful, original designs created by a human.

For a quote or to learn more, click the green button for a contact form, or email me at george@byGeorgeMiller.com.

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Our process

Get in touch

My work

Hustle's 10th anniversary

DigiDems site redesign

Earthshot Prize guidebook

Get the word out, the fun way

Testimonials

Our process

Get in touch

My work

Hustle's 10th anniversary

DigiDems site redesign

Earthshot Prize guidebook

Get the word out, the fun way

Testimonials

Hustle's 10th anniversary

Deliverables

Brief

Solution

More branding projects

Including

The Art League

Democratic Talent Pool

DigiDems site redesign

Specifications

Brief

Solution

Process

More digital projects

Including

#TeamTurnout resource portal

Hustle user guide

Social infographics

This website

Earthshot Prize guidebook

Specifications

Brief

Solution

More print projects

Including

Wall art for IQMP

Camp Hustle postcard

#VotersOf2020

Impact Report

Holiday card

Wall of merch

Including

Stickers

Tote

Apparel

GOTV kits

More about me

Design services I offer

Who I work with

Not sure what you need designed?

My design tools

My values

About LLMs and “A.I.”

How to reach me

Contact me

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