So get inspired, and support these incredible LGBTQ+ designers making waves in the creative industry. 

7 LGBTQ Designers You Should Know About

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4 Visual Accessibility Resources for Designers

Designs are only as successful as your user makes them out to be.

Jinkx Monsoon "The Ginger Snapped" // Tour Intro Animation

Daniel Quasar - transmit (Official Music Video)

7 Non-Binary Designers You Should Know About

7 Nonbinary Designers You Should Know About

Brands have gone to court over color trademark battles for years - check out some of the biggest color wins.

Can you own a color?

Two chocolate companies walk into a courtroom to battle over... the color purple. 

7 Female Designers You Should Know About

Houston Landing is a local nonprofit newsroom with no paywalls to provide essential journalism that empowers our communities.

Meet Houston Landing: designing the next frontier of local news

A new, nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet for local voices.

Seven Black Designers You Should Know About

When we look at design history books, we see Eurocentric covered pages with names, photos, and pieces of work. These books ultimately set the standard in student’s minds on what “good design” looks like. The books that influence our outlook on the design world lack representation and voices from influential designers of color who played crucial parts in shaping that said design world.  It’s no secret that black designers are overlooked and under-applauded. It’s time to change that reality by learning their names, recognizing their work and teaching the new generation of designers that ‘good design’ is more expansive than what a design history textbook can hold.

7 Black Designers You Should Know

7 Native American Designers You Should Know About

Support Indigenous designers in the creative industry.

7 Asian + Asian-American Designers You Should Know About

This AAPI Heritage Month we wanted to highlight these Asian + Asian American designers. Maybe you'll find a new favorite designer.

Expand your design horizons this AAPI Heritage Month.

Movistar: Love Story

H&M Conscious: Bring it on

Propaganda Bandwagon - Old Navy Commercial

Always #LikeAGirl

Things Go Better With Coke

Full Pepsi Commercial Starring Kendal Jenner

Beats By Dre | Powerbeats Pro | Unleashed

Febreze Commercial-Josh's room

Samsung Note 9 Dongle (DEX) Commercial

He Said Cigarettes To Women Are "Torches Of Freedom"

FLEX  TAPE® Commercial

The word propaganda carries a lot of negative weight compared to the word advertising. Propaganda is associated with evil, manipulation and a dystopian society. Whereas advertising is associated with an annoying, unavoidable but scrollable, part of our day-to-day life.
One feels harmful, the other feels harmless. 

Propaganda is limited to a specific agenda or mission. Advertising builds upon that by adding in goods, services, and ideas. Many, if not all of the day-to-day ads we scroll past or walk by incorporate some level of propaganda to pursued you into buying that said good, service, or switching up how you view something.

Propaganda in Advertising

Red means stop and green means go, but what happens when you are red-green color blind?

The Traffic Light Flaw

A deep and semi-unscientific look into how designers simplify in order to create.

Why Do Designers Wear Black?

Color runs through our veins as designers but we don’t wear it on our sleeves. 

A deep-dive into the history, complexities and clarity that comes with logos.

Why Are Logos A Thing?

Let's throw it back to the very beginning of logo design.

Bill and Jo discuss inclusivity, diversity and the importance of civic action while taking a look at the League of Women Voters of Houston brand.

Offset Path: The League of Women Voters of Houston

“Offset path” is a function in design program Adobe Illustrator. It’s also the name of our design discussion series that looks at how Black Sheep rebellious brands and campaigns for social impact that are different from, well, the usual “path.” To know when Offset Path episodes are announced or to watch us live on Instagram, follow @shearcreativity. Hosts are Black Sheep’s Creative Director Jo Skillman and Senior Designer/Illustrator Bill Ferenc.

Bill and Jo talk through the process of building Houston and Harris County’s “YES! to the Census” campaign to prevent an undercount for Census 2020.

YES! to the Census

Transforming healthcare for children and their families: Doug Dietz at TEDxSanJoseCA 2012

A greater understanding of empathy in design.

The Power of Empathy in Design

Why your brand needs a purpose, a personality and a point of view to live in the real world

Branding Like You Mean It

We believe in the power of great design to build creative concepts that push nonprofit communities to the brink of action.

How to use design to activate people for good

For years I’ve been designing logos, brands, and engagement campaigns for a brand strategy and creative agency called Black Sheep. We’re called Black Sheep for all the reasons you might guess: We do things differently. We’re ahead of the curve. We break the rules. Blah, blah, blah, insert predictable design agency phrase here. 

Donating Your Work: Don’t Get Taken for a Ride

Raise your hand if you’ve ever been hit up for free (or deeply discounted) work.

Keep your hand up if you said yes to doing the free (or deeply discounted) work because it was “for a good cause.”

Drop that hand onto your face if you ended up hating everything about the experience of the free (or deeply discounted) work you ended up doing. That’s a facepalm, and it’s the correct response to a whole lot of the donated work designers and marketers end up doing.

Condensed

Did you let Valentine’s creep up on you? Were you bummed with the lack of creativity in this year’s crop of cards?

Valentine’s Printables

For years, the advice to every nonprofit was some version of "be more like a brand." Post more. Sound more polished. Chase the same tricks beverage and mattress companies use to win attention. But that advice is going out of date fast. 

Here's the good news buried in the shift: being human, being rooted in a real community, telling the truth about the work you do - these used to just be things nonprofits talked about. Now they're becoming part of how the algorithm decides who gets seen.

Let’s be real, the social media feed you're posting into isn't the feed you learned on. There are three changes to pay attention to here:

You are no longer broadcasting to your followers. You're being matched to people by interest, whether they follow you or not. According to Meta, only 17% of time on Facebook and 7% on Instagram goes to content from friends and family. The rest is strangers' content, served by an algorithm reading for interest, not relationship. This means that follower count matters less than it used to; what your organization is actually about matters way more.

For a decade, the game was capturing eyeballs at any cost, but that game is almost out of runway. This new reality rewards the meaning people seek out, instead of the noise people scroll past. A nonprofit was never going to out-shout a beverage brand for attention, and it doesn't have to start now.

Bots now account for more than half of all web traffic, the first time automated activity has outpaced human activity online. Add the flood of low-effort AI content built to trigger a reaction, and feeds get louder, faker, and angrier by the month. Outrage travels, so platforms keep rewarding it, regardless of whether it's true.

Platforms are starting to notice the same AI slop we are, and they're building against it. As feeds fill with machine-made content, audiences and the platforms chasing those audiences are turning toward visible effort, texture and even imperfection. 

Authenticity is starting to get measured less as a brand value and more as "proof of process": can people actually see the work behind the thing? Instagram has begun actively suppressing reposted and aggregated content for exactly this reason. Original, human, made-for-the-platform work is now structurally advantaged, not just ethically preferable.

The appetite for this is showing up in surprising places too. Myspace's owners are reportedly plotting a relaunch, betting that algorithm fatigue is real enough that people will pay attention to a platform explicitly selling itself as an escape from optimized feeds.

Brands without a real story are feeling the squeeze from the other direction. Even insurance companies and mattress brands, categories built on being interchangeable, are now scrambling to act like media companies just to stay visible, hiring writers and building personalities where there used to be none. But your nonprofit isn't scrambling for any of that. The real stories, real people and real process you already have aren't a compliance requirement anymore. They're the raw material every faceless brand is spending real money trying to fake.

You're the expert. Make sure AI knows it.

The same shift is happening in search. More than half of Google queries now return an AI-generated answer before a person ever clicks a website. Being the credible, well-documented source those answers get built from is starting to matter as much as being the thing someone finds by scrolling. Same principle, different doorway: substance and legitimacy are becoming the input, not just the output.

No one knows your mission, your people, and your work better than you do. When someone asks an AI assistant how to get involved in your cause, that answer should be built from what you've actually published, not a stranger's guess or a five-year-old blog post. Making sure your own documentation is the source AI pulls from isn't just a search tactic. It's how you keep your story accurate and keep your work moving forward, instead of watching it get flattened into someone else's summary.

What this actually means for your nonprofit online

Here's the part that should feel like relief: none of this asks you to get louder, weirder or more "on brand." It asks you to do less pretending and more proving. Show the work. Show the people. Let the algorithm find you doing the thing you're actually good at, instead of trying to out-shout accounts that were never your competition to begin with or hoping to be stumbled upon via hashtag soup.

The real question is whether what you post could hold up to a stranger asking, "how do I know this is real?" That's a content question, a design question and a strategy question all at once, and it's the kind of work that's easy to know you need and hard to carve out time for.

That's the work we do at Black Sheep Agency. We help mission-driven organizations turn what's already true about them- the real stories, the real people, the real process- into content and strategy built for a moment when that's exactly what gets rewarded.

Why Nonprofits Might Finally Win the Algorithm

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift and what to do next.

The algorithm stopped rewarding polish and started rewarding (human) proof

The algorithm now rewards real stories and community over polish and AI content. See why nonprofits are positioned to win the shift, and what to do next.

The Black Sheep blog is turning up the volume on community engagement, social media strategy, Houston happenings and what it means to lead a purpose-driven life.

The Black Sheep Agency | Social impact and nonprofit blog

We like to type as much as we like to listen.

We're not shy.