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Design like you give a damn.

What Design Can Do — Event Design, Identity, Motion

The Challenge
Establish What Design Can Do as a global movement that harnesses design to address major societal challenges. The initiative needed a bold, flexible identity that could unify its mission under a single, recognizable brand—one that felt urgent, actionable, and universally relevant.

The Strategy
Create a minimal yet powerful graphic system built on just four core elements: yellow and red, a typeface, and a bold brushstroke. The simplicity ensures clarity and adaptability, while the boldness reflects the initiative’s call to action: Design like you give a damn.

The Solution
The resulting identity is instantly recognizable—both in the Netherlands and abroad. By consistently applying these elements, the brand has become synonymous with design-driven impact, proving that restraint and purpose can create a movement as powerful as the causes it champions.

Design Festivals

On a mission to inspire creatives around the world we’ve produced multi-day design festivals in Amsterdam, São Paulo, México-City and Delhi. Custom festival brands, online, PR and out of home campaigns helped to draw in over 15,000 design enthusiasts.

Design challenges

Next to bringing inspiration we’ve challenged designers to actively participate in tackling societies most urgent issues like climate change, the plight of refugees and other social topics. Since 2016 over 10,000 participants have joined the challenge programme. For each programme a project brand and recruitment campaign was developed under the umbrella of the WDCD brand.

Publishing

With communication campaigns, PR and via online and print publications we’ve managed to reach a larger audience with WDCD’s messaging. The signature yellow is ever standing out like a strong beacon in an oversaturated visual world.