How two refugees created a design agency that's changing the world
Deroy Peraza (left) and Julia Zeltser, the cofounders of social good design agency Hyperakt, in their Brooklyn studio. Photo: Nina Roberts
Published in Mashable on April 25, 2016
Situated in Brooklyn’s Gowanus neighborhood, blocks away from a Whole Foods and the Morbid Anatomy Museum of death-obsessed hipsterdom, the cavernous storefront of social impact design studio Hyperakt stands out.
The open studio is quiet — the only sound comes from the humming tubular vents overhead and a handful of staff who confer in whispers. Most of the others focus quietly on their iMac screens.
Unlike stereotypically pristine, carefully curated design studios, Hyperakt's space is a little more freewheeling. Utilitarian shelving units are haphazardly packed with supplies; dark, reclaimed wood desks with metal legs are pushed together to form long working spaces, flanked by contemporary office chairs on wheels.
Founded in 2001, Hyperakt's 15-person team has focused on social impact design since 2009, when its cofounders, designers Deroy Peraza and Julia Zeltser, phased out the types of clients who needed things like dog leash branding or Camel cigarette ads in Spanish.
For the past seven years they have worked exclusively for NGOs, nonprofits and other social good organizations.
“It’s really satisfying to see memberships increase, donations increase and the caliber of volunteers rise,” Zeltser tells Mashable, decked out in a colorful woolly sweater and scarf of magentas and reds.
One of their latest projects is a beautiful, interactive map that chronicles 40 years of global refugee migration using data from UNHCR, the U.N. refugees agency. It's an important topic, but one that also points to Hyperakt's roots.
Peraza was an asylum seeker from Cuba, arriving in Miami as a child in 1984. Zeltser was a religious refugee from Ukraine who landed in New York as a teenager in 1993. The two met on the first day of classes at the New School's Parsons School of Design in New York City in 1996.
“I was an annoying, arrogant loudmouth,” says Peraza, who has a healthy swath of hair on top of his otherwise closely shaved head. “Julia’s more studious, the good kid.”
While at Parsons, they discovered a healthy competitiveness and a shared drive to succeed, which they attribute to being immigrants.
“You just don’t take shit for granted,” Peraza says, noting the many "rich kids" who simply cruised by. “Every opportunity we got, we busted our butt to do it.”
Projects that resonate
Hyperakt leapt into the social good sector full-force because it’s where the team created its best work.
Zeltser cites one client as a good example: educational nonprofit iMentor, which they’re currently helping to rebrand their mentorship program. Other clients include big names like the Ford Foundation, United Nations, NAACP, and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Sitting in Hyperakt’s conference room, moments after Zeltser shrieked with laughter when Peraza rustled up an old Camel ad they made, they reveal their two essential and successful marketing tools.
First is the active creation of community, both virtually and physically; for example, their once-a-month Lunch Talk series holds free and public forums among creative people, "designed to foster knowledge, sharing and casual conversation" over food and beer.
Second is spending time and resources on experimental, self-generated projects, which often go viral or land on design blogs and magazine pages. In 2008 they created posters in support of then-Senator Barack Obama that led to an exhibit at Flux Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Hyperakt also took a challenge in 2013 to rebrand the teaching profession, an assignment from Kurt Anderson, the host of radio show Studio 360. And a noteworthy work in progress is On the Grid, a neighborhood guide for cities around the globe created in collaboration with local design studios.
Clearing her throat, Zeltser teases Peraza that she usually works on the jobs that bring in income, while he gets to experiment with viral hits like these.
“It’s the self-generated stuff that gets all the attention,” he counters, sounding slightly defensive.
The Refugee Project is one of these self-generated assignments. The team initially saw the U.N.’s refugee data in 2012, and while it was compelling, it was presented in such a dull manner that it might speak to academics but no one else.
So they collaborated with information designer and artist Ekene Ijeoma on The Refugee Project to allow users to easily see the exact number of refugees to and from countries by year. Ijeoma notes that in the past, photographs, rather than visualized data, have been used to communicate such social issues.
“But you can only see what’s in the frame,” he says. Data, he adds, provides a more expansive story.
The Refugee Project caught the eye of the Annenberg Space for Photography’s curators, and will be part of the upcoming show in Los Angeles called New Americans, in conjunction with an exhibit called "Refugee," which opens on April 23. The Refugee Project will be projected on huge screens and remain interactive, providing historical context to the exhibit.
The project, and the crisis overall, resonate with both Peraza and Zeltser, but neither say they were anywhere close to the dire situation the Syrians refugees are in now.
“When the opportunity came, my parents packed and went,” Zeltser says.
Her whole family had experienced anti-Semitism in Ukraine. She distinctly remembers one interaction with close friends when she was about nine.
"When they found out I am Jewish ... they said, ‘You can’t be Jewish,'" she says. "I said why? ‘Because Jews are no good.’”
When her family came to New York, they lived in Washington Heights near the George Washington Bridge, often feeling what Zeltser calls the "boom, boom" — thumping bass from the neighborhood merengue and bachata music.
“I do remember wanting more than anything to integrate into society,” says Zeltser, who went to High School of the Humanities in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.
That moment eventually came — when she could understand and make jokes in English…
A need for social good design
Folksy iconography once dominated nonprofit branding and campaigns — messaging that eventually shifted primarily to photography, sometimes paired with graphic design.
But today’s nonprofits want to tell compelling stories about social issues through clean, even sleek design — and it's made easier with the many technology options available. WordPress and Drupal, among other platforms, make it possible even for the summer intern to create a decent blog or website, and that can be tempting, given many nonprofits' small budgets.
However, it still takes a masterful designer, storyteller, information architect and even a brand specialist to engage large audiences about social issues. And while nonprofits are known to have few funds to allocate to such positions, Peraza says many organizations do have communications budgets.
That's where the services of design agencies like Hyperakt come in. In the digital age, when raising awareness or donations online is often reliant on good, eye-catching design, many nonprofits are willing to dedicate the necessary resources.
“There’s less money spent on big printed reports that get seen by 100 people,” Peraza says. "There's more money spent on digital projects that get seen by hundreds of thousands of people.”
One step at a time
The humor is not lost on Zeltser and Peraza that they both fled former communist countries, were brought up in robustly pro-capitalist households in the U.S., and now work for massive nonprofit bureaucracies striving for social change. Are their clients of choice a form of rebellion?
“It’s more nuanced than 'communists are the bad guys, capitalists are the good guys,'” Peraza says. "There are grayscales in there, and a value system doesn’t have to be formed by that dichotomy.”
Peraza adds that he’s not personally a communist.
“I do appreciate and thrive from the opportunity that is granted to us here in a capitalist system,” he says. “But I also believe in the importance of human rights and of social issues, and not just thinking about money.”
Hyperakt continues to work on local and international social good projects, from rebranding the Vera Institute of Justice to branding a new Conflict Preparedness and Protection initiative for Norwegian People’s Aid.
Hyperakt has no financial backers, no investor capital. Instead, they’ve built the business one step at a time.
“Part of the immigrant mentality,” Peraza explains. “Don’t ever take anything you can’t pay back.”