Love. It’s what makes your heart sing. It’s rapturous moments of complete joy where everything seems perfect and the stars are all aligned. If we are creatives, we yearn to design, write, draw or paint with love too . . . but in the course of our days, the creative juju can get lost. We run our businesses, find ourselves more involved with paperwork, administrative tasks and a never-ending stream of meetings. We forget what it’s like to be deeply involved in the process of creation just for the love of it.

Sharing design love is the mission of founder, Troy Monroe, who along with founding members Rich Hollant, Constanza Gowen-Segovia and Brian Grabell created Design is Love.  With a gorgeous site design and welcoming language, Design is Love invites you to help share and shape a unique creative community with heart. But DIL isn’t just a meeting place for designers. If you are a non-profit, Design is Love can help you too by matching your needs and goals with a creative who believes in what you do.

According to Monroe, “We want to provide stimulating opportunities for our members to explore their creativity through funded projects and engaging communication, along with a match-making system that brings creatives and non-profit organizations together—taking the positive energy promoted here and sharing it with the world at large. As stewards of our profession, you can count on us to lead by example and uphold standards in work practice that are beneficial to both creatives and their clients.” Nice!

Design Is Love greets you on every page with “Hi. We’re happy you’re here.”  I know these guys and they actually mean it, and when something is created with heart felt emotion the universe responds. After a year and a half in development and only 4 months online, already Design Is Love has received recognition and support from across the nation and internationally. “We recently stumbled onto a wonderful Russian design website and publication called kak.ru and were compelled to reach out to the editors to express our admiration for the awesome work they’re producing,” reports DIL. “We also used the opportunity to share the Design Is Love story with the kak editors in hopes of growing our community with the help of a few comrades from the other side of the globe. The results are better than we could have ever imagined. We are very pleased to report that as a direct result of the posting, the DIL community has grown with a host of new profiles being added from all over Europe.”

Can it be that as a global society we are actually taking a step back from self absorption and looking toward helping one another? Really truly?  Yes, I think so. And it’s a welcome change that I see it happening everywhere. Perhaps brought on by the undermining blows that we, our families, and our neighbors took during the recession or in viewing chaos in the world, we have finally figured out that we need to rely on and help one another. I’m a firm believer in the power of people, and united together, things can happen. Wonderful things.

Here are three ways you can get involved with the good folks at Design Is Love:

Helping Hand – Find your Match and do Something Great Together. This initiative matches non-profits with creatives who want to help. “Helping Hand is a way to start relationships with real professionals who share your goals and vision.” So far DIL has the designers, writers, illustrators, programmers, and photographers. Now what they need is you, the non-profit organizations.  So follow this link to the Design is Love website and you can be the recipient of a creative’s heart felt expression designed for communicating your message out into the world.

The Design Fund – Participate + Support Design Is Love Initiatives. Design Fund projects are periodic adventures for personal creative exploration. Each project is a chance for you to produce a piece of work to share with everyone.  See a project you’re passionate about? Get involved and be a part of something special. Each project is selected and voted on by the community and runs for only a specific length of time. The latest project is Supporting Disaster Relief. You pick the colors and content and create a t-shirt to support disaster relief efforts. DIL picks the winner. Deadline is fast approaching on August 15, 2010.

Inwords – Here the folks at DIL post a topic to start a conversation. Where it goes is up to you but each topic lasts only two weeks. Past discussions included “What keeps you up at night?”, “Is perfection possible?”, “What’s your biggest obstacle?”.  There are only three more days to tell DIL “About your ideal workspace.”  Also check out the archive, “The place where all meaningful conversations go to live a happy life after they’re closed. Think of it as an online filing cabinet for great exchanges and dialogue.”

So here’s how it all happened, explains Troy Monroe, “Design is Love started as a response to conversations with creatives across the country. So much of the dialogue revolved around building businesses and fear of competition that we felt like odd-birds talking about the value of working from the heart. Above all else, building emotional connections through design has been at the core of our design process here at co:lab. It’s such a rich, empowering experience that we wanted to share it with everyone. The “everyone” part is where the idea of a web site came in.”

I’m so happy to have been asked to be an adviser for Design Is Love. It’s a project that speaks to my heart and I hope it might speak to yours as well. Please visit the Design Is Love website , become a member, and as Troy says “Let’s create stuff. Let’s commit to sharing real connections. Let’s collaborate and make a big difference. We look forward to building this campaign together, with mutual support and promises of lasting relationships. Design is Love, after all.”

You can also find DIL on Facebook and Twitter.  Or send me a note or comment, I’ll hook you up so they can hook you up.

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