"Design as Declaration"
Design as Declaration, Nick Adam MFA 18 GD Fights Hate with Infrastructure
When the State of Illinois launched Help Stop Hate, the mission was simple and impossible: stop the quiet epidemic of hate acts spreading across the state. Make reporting easy. Make it visible. Make it matter. RISD alum Nick Adam led the team at Span in the design of the brand identity and campaign. The impact was immediate and staggering. In its first week, the helpline logged five times more reports than the previous six months combined. A 12,000% spike. That’s not a statistic. That’s lives pulled out of silence. Design didn’t decorate this statewide service. It built it.
Nick Adam and his team worked alongside service designers to ensure the hotline, the identity, and the campaign were trauma-informed—meeting people where they are, in their own voice. That meant delivering the work in the seven most-spoken languages across Illinois (Spanish, Arabic, Tagalog, Mandarin, Polish, Hindi, and English) and ensuring every touchpoint felt safe, usable, and real. The result: a service designed not just to exist, but to work.
The project drew national recognition. Steven Heller chronicled how Adam and his team fused state government, service design, and visual culture into one operating system. And in Creative Review, Adam outlined how the field can respond to the ecosystem of hate: “That’s not design as decoration. It’s design as declaration.” Design can normalize hate. Or it can resist it. It can accelerate division. Or it can build belonging. But only if designers are aware of the opportunity—and willing to act. Adam credits RISD and his MFA cohort with seeding this conviction. His graduate thesis explored design as public work that performs under pressure, withstands scrutiny, and delivers engagement and impact that surpass every industry expectation.
