Photo by Flickr user prometheusradio

Two weekends ago I was lucky enough to get to Detroit for the 2010 U.S. Social Forum. The USSF is a gathering place for more than ten thousand activists & organizers from all over the country to meet and learn from from each other - and attempt to chart a course forward for the many U.S. social movements represented there.

The USSF started as a result of the first World Social Forum in 2001, which was itself set up to be a counter-balance to the elite-centric World Economic Forum. 2010 was USSF's second incarnation (the first was in 2007 in Detroit).

Having been to both U.S. Social Forums, there are quite a few differences, though all pointing in a positive direction. Here are three:

• This USSF was much more diverse. Even though minority groups were well-represented in 2007, I noticed many more people of color and differently-abled people in attendance this time. It was also geographically diverse: I met folks from every region and, it seems, just about every state in the Union.

• The facilities were much better arranged and planned. One of the drawbacks to the 2007 Social Forum was that due to lack of space, many workshops had to be held in far-flung buildings, sometimes more than a mile away from the main conference center. Add to that searing heat and humidity as only Atlanta in late June can offer, and you end up with a lot of great workshops that are very poorly attended. This time, almost all the workshops were held in either the main convention hall or one of the buildings right next door.

• The third difference I'd like to highlight is the focus of this blog post: this was a much better-designed conference.

By better-designed, I mean that just about every printed material I saw there clearly bore the mark of a designer's touch: from the official conference packet, to the glossy postcards and fliers every other person tried to hand me, to the posters and swag on the myriad of organization tables. This is a marked improvement from USSF 2007, where there were far more Microsoft Word-created fliers than I had energy to cringe at.

I talked to folks who were tabling, and many of them told me that over the past year or two they had for the first time dedicated a part of their budget to design work, and they had connected with volunteers who had design skills. This is a phenomenal development.

One of the prerequisites of growing social movements is accessibility to new and prospective participants. A key component of that is visual effectiveness. If our outreach materials look haphazard and poorly made, it costs us in very real terms - terms that are all too-often overlooked when planning a campaign or action.

The left has brilliant ideas, inspiring visions of a better world, and increasingly uses effective and compelling rhetoric to convey them to everyone else. For those groups who do everything else right, our task becomes finding an opening in today's advertising-soaked mental landscape to actually reach people. In those cases, "what about design?" is a make or break question.

I'm happy to report that if the U.S. Social Forum is any indication, the left is answering that question very well.

Of course, the Justseeds Artist's Cooperative was there, with the best designed posters of all.