STARTING 2023 WITH EVERY MEAL

Every year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, our staff takes the day to give back to our community. This year, our Minneapolis staff gathered at Every Meal, an organization that focuses on filling the food gaps children face on weekends and extended breaks and in the summer, when they are not able to access school meal programs. Our team packed over 1,000 meals for children and families.

As many of our team members are remote, they gave back to their communities by donating clothes to a local women’s community center, collecting healthy foods for a food shelf, writing letters to a local senior center, building a website for a local church and much more.

CHEERS TO 2022!

What a wonderful year it has been. We are thankful this year and every year for our amazing clients, partners and staff. Thank you for being part of our story!

Here are a few things we are especially grateful for this year.

• We welcomed 13 new employees to our team, and expanded our footprint across Maryland, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Texas and beyond.
• We welcomed five beautiful babies to our growing Fusion Hill family!
• We celebrated our staff’s many achievements. Our director of Research & Strategy, Cady Patton, won AdFed’s 32 under 32 award, and our VP of Research & Strategy, Amy Behrens, and creative director, Sara Rubinett, celebrated 10 years at Fusion Hill.
• We supported and partnered with amazing, diverse vendors for everything from client gifts to catering to office photography. Here are some of the fantastic businesses we worked with: Whims and Joy, Soul Bowl, jcoco, Minny + Paul, Roseline’s Candles, Kahawa 1893 and Thumb’s Cookies.
• We continued our streak of award-winning work. Our creative team partnered with Optum Behavioral Health to win two Optum Hermes awards: one for Teen Conversation-Starter Cards and one for the YOU Supported campaign. We also secured a Platinum Hermes Creative Award for a large brand launch on behalf of our clients at Spave.
• Our research team started traveling again for in-person research with visits to San Francisco, New York, DC, Dallas, Charlotte, Philadelphia, San Diego and more. We can’t wait to explore more cities in the new year.
• This year, we gave back to our local and global communities through CARE’s Ukrainian Crisis Fund, NAWBO Catalyst Fund, The BrandLab, Art Buddies, Northside Achievement Zone, National Urban League, Joyya and more.

With gratitude,

— Your Friends at Fusion Hill

Accessibility First: 4 Areas of Impact

In April, our teams participated in a day of discipline-specific training that allowed each group to focus on themes most relevant to their everyday work. Our creative team chose accessibility both as a general refresher and as a deep dive into making our work more inclusive. The day started with a presentation from Lynn Wehrman, president/founder of and director of public relations at WeCo Accessibility Services.

WeCo is a company based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that unites organizations with expert professionals living with disabilities. Their mission is to foster accessibility, awareness and independence for all people, regardless of their disabilities.

We approached WeCo and Lynn to help our team understand the evolving world of accessible design in both digital and physical spaces. Before we met, our team asked, “What would our accessibility checklist look like if it was created by a group of people currently living with disabilities?” Lynn came prepared with an ultimate wish list of action items for our team to focus on. Presenting the wish list and the perspectives from her team members who live with various disabilities provided our team with tangible input from people who are impacted by design decisions every day.

After our morning with Lynn, our team participated in conversations about how we can implement all facets of accessibility more concretely into our design process at Fusion Hill. There were many useful takeaways from our training day; here are a few:

• Strive for organizational awareness AND technical know-how. All team members should understand not only why this work is important but also how to technically implement accessibility standards across all types of materials.
• Consider mental health when thinking about accessibility. Cognitive disabilities cover a range of conditions, including dyslexia, depression, ADHD, epilepsy and brain injuries, as well as intellectual or memory impairment.
• Factor in more disabilities than just blindness when working on visual assets. Data from 2012 reveals the disabilities most impacted by computer use by people in the U.S.:
• • Mobility: 19.9 million
  • Cognition: 15.2 million
  • Blindness: 8.1 million
  • Hearing 7.6 million
• Avoid making assumptions about users with disabilities. This includes viewing projects through a purely “visual” lens and making assumptions that certain disability types don’t require accessibility considerations.

We are eager to continue refining our commitment to incorporating accessibility into our design process over the next few months and beyond. One specific project we are excited to implement our learnings in is our refresh of the Fusion Hill website. Stay tuned for more updates on that later this year!

Design gets bold: 2022 trends to watch

Goodbye, subtle and clean. Hello, big and bold. In our annual review of design trends, we’re seeing some exciting changes, and they’re sparking a lot of interesting conversations here at Fusion Hill. Join us for a quick look into what’s hot this year. We hope you enjoy the report and find elements of inspiration that can be applied to the more structured world of corporate design.

SHARING THE JOYYA

We’re so excited to announce the rebrand of Joyya! After partnering with what was then Freeset Global in 2017 to create our client holiday gifts, we were inspired to forge a deeper partnership with this great organization. In early 2019, we donated our research, strategy and creative capabilities to help them rebrand as they merged two organizations, Freeset and Common Good, into one. Learn more about our work with them.

Our cross-discipline efforts captured the inspiring work that was accomplished by Freeset, from producing ethically sourced goods to providing meaningful employment for women in West Bengal, India. We are inspired by Joyya’s life-changing work and can’t wait to see what they’ll achieve next.

Cheers to you, Joyya, on your successful rebrand!