CLIENT:
Foundation for Tacoma Students
SERVICES:
Education collaborative convenes advocates and lawmakers to align on policy priorities aimed at improving outcomes for Washington youth.
Foundation for Tacoma Students (FFTS), the organization behind Graduate Tacoma’s push toward a 2030 goal of getting 70% of Tacoma students into a degree, credential, or good-earning job, hosts an annual Advocacy Breakfast that brings together educators, lawmakers, and community partners to rally support behind its state policy priorities. Ayouni designed the full suite of materials behind the event and the advocacy work that follows it: the Advocacy Breakfast slide deck, the annual State Advocacy Agenda one-pager, and Pathways to Possibilities, FFTS’s full policy platform report.
THE CHALLENGE:
The materials needed a distinct look of their own, something that felt tailored to this specific event and its supporting documents, while still staying recognizably close to FFTS’s core brand identity. That balance had to hold across three very different touch points: a live slide deck built to hold a room’s attention and understanding, a short-form print one-pager built to be scanned in seconds, and a long-form print policy report built to sustain a reader across dozens of pages. The content matter also contained a ton of data and information that needed to be clear, all while giving policymakers the funding data, enrollment trends, and multi-year timelines they needed to actually act, not just a stack of dense reading. Each format made different demands on how much information it could carry and how fast a reader needed to absorb it, so the same distinct-but-connected identity had to flex across all three without feeling stitched together or losing the data’s clarity along the way.
OUR APPROACH:
Ayouni applied FFTS’s standard brand elements (blue/green color palette, bold display type, familiar icon language, and high-quality imagery of community) consistently across all three materials, with one deliberate departure: a signature gradient treatment used specifically for the Advocacy Breakfast materials, giving this event its own visual signal without introducing a separate identity.
Making the data itself clear was just as central to the work as the visual language. Dense data, funding formulas, enrollment trends, demographic achievement gaps, multi-year policy timelines, was translated into charts, icon-driven breakdowns, and simplified diagrams like the Theory of Action framework, so that complex research could be understood at a glance rather than requiring a close read.
Making the data itself clear was just as central to the work as the visual language. Dense data, funding formulas, enrollment trends, demographic achievement gaps, multi-year policy timelines, was translated into charts, icon-driven breakdowns, and simplified diagrams like the Theory of Action framework, so that complex research could be understood at a glance rather than requiring a close read.
That clarity had to hold across very different reading speeds: the slide deck leaned on large-scale charts and high-contrast visuals built to register instantly from across a room, the State Advocacy Agenda one-pager distilled the same priorities into a scannable icon grid, and Pathways to Possibilities, the full policy platform, used consistent section dividers, a repeating goal-and-action structure, and detailed data visualizations to walk readers through the research at a pace built for sustained attention.
Across all three, the specific policy priorities carried consistently from the room to the one-pager to the full report, so that a legislator encountering any single piece would recognize the same ask.