Mobilizing on the Right to Housing
with the Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network
The Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network is a collective of diverse women, including those with lived expertise, who are working to eliminate homelessness and housing insecurity for women, girls, and gender-diverse peoples across Canada.
Sector:
Housing Justice
Services:
Editorial Design
Graphic Design
Illustration
Branding
Learn More:
Visit the toolkit website
The Women’s National Housing and Homelessness Network (WNHHN) filed two claims to call attention to Canada’s failure to address the homelessness crisis. This step resulted in a review panel with one year to dive deeper into the issue. The resulting panel, Neha, examines the right to safe, adequate and affordable housing for women, Two Spirit, Trans and gender-diverse people, and the government’s duty to uphold this right. As part of this project WNHHN created a toolkit for communities connect to lived experts, gather evidence, and engage in the process.
Therefore, the designed toolkit had to:
Provide practical tools and templates to enable Review Panel participation
Provide tools and diverse frameworks and mechanisms to enable community organizing on the right to housing
Democratize knowledge about the right to housing in Canada and how to claim it
Anti-Heroine Media joined the project to ensure that the toolkit design met these goals. We created a distinct brand identity for this project, with a palette of bright and bold eye-catching colours to use throughout the design. These colours reflect common shades used in protest movements around the world, and take inspiration from the Progress Pride and Disability Justice flags. The eight colours in the palette also correspond with the eight parts of the toolkit. This helps make the document easier to navigate for folks looking to access specific elements and resources. We chose the Lexend font because it is specifically designed with accessibility in mind for those with visual or cognitive disabilities. It is clean and graphic, which works well to balance out the bold and punchy colour palette.
We knew we needed to create a document that was accessible and easy-to-read, while also highlighting the vibrant communities who would be using it. The resulting design is bold and colourful, with lots of high impact original illustrations throughout. The illustration style takes inspiration from pop and street artists, who have long used the form to challenge the status quo, often in non-traditional settings. This links directly to the issue of housing, especially in urban spaces, and community collaboration for change.
The illustrations serve two purposes throughout the toolkit: to visualize specific actions and/or elements to make them more accessible to the reader, and as stylistic accents to break up the text and incorporate the spirit of artivism into the work. These include forward-looking renderings of what our world can look like if we succeed in the mission of ensuring housing for all. With this in mind, it was especially important for us to illustrate different examples of what housing can look like. Plants and nature imagery are tied into the depictions to symbolize that housing is a natural human right, something that should be guaranteed to everyone.