The hardest part of designing the Braided Solidarities conference was not finding enough visual material. It was noticing when one culture had begun to overpower the other, even though every individual choice looked defensible on its own.
Our early directions leaned too heavily on Asian references. In weekly reviews, we stopped treating balance as something the final composition would solve and made it part of the process. We brought in Coast Salish basket-weaving and whale imagery, then consulted outside the team so those references were not reduced to surface decoration.
That changed how I thought about consistency too. The website, posters, brochures, lanyards, and bilingual materials did not need to look identical. Each medium could keep its own character as long as the larger system still communicated interconnection and care.
Cultural sensitivity was not a review step at the end of the work. It was the work: repeated conversation, course correction, and a willingness to discard an attractive direction when it carried the wrong weight.