I co-led Design Hamal with Orit Dolev and Amiel Preis Blum: a volunteer design operation for aid and advocacy. In its first two weeks, about 1,000 designers joined and nearly 200 requests came in.
TL;DR
I co-led Design Hamal, also called the Design War Room, with Orit Dolev and Amiel Preis Blum. It was a volunteer design operation for aid and advocacy. We ran it on monday.com, with a core team of about 15 designers, and matched requests to people who could make the work.
How it started
Amiel Preis Blum started the initiative in the first days after 7 October 2023. The first working version grew out of a monday.com designers WhatsApp group. Our first Zoom had five people. From there I managed the operation with Orit and Amiel, and with colleagues who stepped in to run it day to day.
The public offer was simple: designers would work for free for nonprofits and independent initiatives that needed posts, video, sites, illustration, and the rest of a campaign.
How requests moved
The operation had two jobs: bring in volunteers, and take in the work. Requests came from organizations, nonprofits, private initiatives, and individuals.
Each request was checked before anyone was matched. We confirmed who was behind it, set expectations, and kept the work non-political, unpaid, and tied to the war. Then we posted it to the volunteer groups and paired it with the right people. Someone on the core team stayed with the project until it was finished.
What was true in the first two weeks
These figures are from the coverage in October 2023, not a later tally.
- About 1,000 volunteers had joined: designers, illustrators, animators, video editors, and copywriters. Portfolio Magazine and Forbes Israel both reported that number.
- Nearly 200 requests had come in, and about half were already finished, with more arriving each day. Portfolio reported this on 24 October 2023.
- More than 100 projects had been answered within the first week. Orit Dolev told Forbes Israel that on 23 October 2023.
The work named in that coverage included hostage and missing-persons campaigns, including billboards in the United States, donation campaigns such as ZAKA, a site for a group that had raised $13 million in donations, shirts, posters, logos, and websites, illustrations for coping with trauma, billboards in cities around the world, documented stories, and explanatory videos in several languages.