Design
for Good
Nominate a Bunbury business that deserves to look as good as it actually is. Enough nominations and it gets made — properly, free, and handed over with no invoice attached.
What it is
Everyone in this town has a place they love that looks like it’s given up.
The bakery that’s been doing it right for twenty-six years behind a sign that’s three logos deep in faded vinyl. The mechanic everyone recommends whose website was built in 2011 and never touched since. The café with the best food in town and a menu printed in four different fonts.
These places aren’t failing. That’s the point. They’re good — they’re just invisible to anybody who hasn’t already been told about them, and they’re losing to newer businesses that are worse at the actual job but better at looking like they know what they’re doing.
So: nominate one. If enough other people nominate the same one, it gets a full identity — logo, signage, menus, the lot — designed properly and given to them. No fee, no retainer, no catch, no obligation to use it.
1
Someone nominates
You name a business and say in a sentence why it deserves it. That’s the whole form.
2
The count builds
Nominations stack up on the board below. The business isn’t told. Nobody gets their hopes up over three votes.
3
Fifty is the line
At fifty nominations the town has made the call, and the work starts. Fifty, because it should cost the community something to ask.
4
It gets handed over
A finished identity, delivered as a gift. Use it, change it, or bin it. It’s theirs either way.
Why it matters
This is the argument for the ocean pool, run at small scale where you can watch it work.
The whole premise of this site is that design changes what people believe is possible — that a drawing beats an argument, and that a thing you can see gets built more often than a thing you can only describe. That’s easy to claim and hard to prove when the subject is an $18 million piece of coastal infrastructure that takes six years to resolve.
A business is the same claim with a short feedback loop. Redo the identity of a good business that looks tired, and within a month you can see whether more people walk in. If it works, the argument stops being a theory.
And the second reason is simpler and less strategic: these are the businesses that sponsor the junior footy team and stay open on public holidays and know your order. They employ people here. Most of them have never had a designer look at their brand, ever, because a proper identity costs more than the thing is worth on paper — and that’s exactly the kind of maths that leaves a town looking worse than it is.
The board
Live nominations. Fifty is the threshold. Nobody on this list has been contacted.
Nothing on the board yet
Put the first one forward and it turns up here, with a count next to it.
0
Nominations and the work starts
Put one forward. A name and a reason is all it takes.
The business doesn’t get told. Not at three nominations, not at forty-nine. If it gets over the line, that’s a conversation that happens properly and in person.
Fair
questions
Mostly asked by business owners, which is the right instinct to have about a stranger offering you something free.
"Imagine getting told fifty people voted that your shop is ugly. I’d be filthy."The first thing an owner says when you explain this
It’s a real risk and it’s the reason for every rule on this page. A nomination is not a complaint — the form asks why a business deserves it, not what’s wrong with it, and nominations only get published in those terms.
It’s also why nobody gets contacted until the count is over. Fifty people saying you’re worth the effort reads completely differently to three people saying your sign is rubbish.
And if an owner is proud of their branding and doesn’t want it touched — that’s a good answer. It stays exactly as it is, and they get told they were nominated, because that part is worth hearing regardless.
No fee, no invoice later, no retainer, no rights retained, no obligation to use any of it. The files are handed over and they belong to the business.
What gets asked for in return is permission to show the before and after on this site. If they’d rather not, it doesn’t go up, and the work is still theirs.
"Free work devalues the trade. There are people here who do this for a living."Fair, and it comes from people who are right about their industry
The businesses that end up on this board are, almost by definition, ones that were never going to commission a paid identity. That’s the whole reason they look the way they do. This isn’t undercutting a quote — there was no quote.
If a nominated business has already engaged a designer, it comes off the board. And if local designers want in on the ones that clear fifty, there’s room — it’s better for the town if this isn’t one person’s hobby.
Because a proper identity is somewhere between forty and eighty hours of work, and that can’t be handed out on a whim.
Fifty is high enough that it takes genuine word of mouth to get there — which means the business is actually loved, not just nominated by a mate. It’s the same mechanism as the rest of this site. The number is what makes it mean something.
Be one ofthe people
0on the list
When one of these clears fifty, the reveal goes out to the list first. Same list that turns up for the ocean pool.
Email and postcode. Nothing else, ever.
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