Kate Mohn has been interested in civic design since her years working in election administration as the Director of Office Administration to former Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. When Kate left politics to work in higher education, she thought she was done thinking about voting systems, but she was wrong. In 2012, the City of Minneapolis approached Minneapolis College of Art Design (MCAD) to inquire if the college would be willing to serve as the polling place for Minneapolis Ward 10 Precinct 9. Kate volunteered to manage the project, and in November of 2012, the college hosted its first presidential election.

It was a mess. Over 1,800 voters turned out in person that day to vote, with some voters waiting over ninety minutes to cast a ballot. The MCAD Main building is also large and can be confusing to navigate; Kate noticed that voters were having a difficult time locating the polling place; others were in the wrong polling place or confused about what kind of documentation they needed to vote. The vast majority of the signage was in English in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Minneapolis with a large populations of Somali- and Spanish-speaking people.

In preparation for the 2014 election cycle, Kate approached DesignWorks, the in-house design firm at MCAD, to begin a project of creating a better-designed voting experience. Working together on a $1,500 budget, the team devised a number of solutions to make the 2014 General Election a much better experience.

When staff from the City of Minneapolis Election Division saw what MCAD had done to improve the voting process, they asked if the college would redesign the directional and informational signage used in the over 100 precincts in the city each Election Day. Kate worked with the city to negotiate the contract (including an innovative clause requiring the City to allow wider distribution of the voting signage under a free creative commons license) for this public-private partnership and served as the administrative liaison between the MCAD design team and the City of Minneapolis. For the 2016 election, the DesignWorks team was able to expand upon its previous work for a unified visual communications system that prioritized information design and user experience.

The branding system designed in 2016 for the City of Minneapolis was then adopted for statewide usage by the Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State for the 2018 election cycle and Kate was interviewed in an Election Day news story on Minnesota Public Radio. The signage continues to be used across the state is available under a non-commercial Creative Common license for any election officials to adopt and modify for their use.

When asked about his experience of working on the voting signage project, Tim Schwarz, an election administrator for the City of Minneapolis and one of the main point people on the project, stated,"Kate's work with implementing enhanced voting signage at our MCAD polling place was phenomenal. Her vision and design aesthetic lead to a variety of wayfinding and informational signage (in multiple languages) that truly made the polling location the best in the city in terms of voter accessibility, education, and overall usability. Beyond that, she brought forward an idea to launch a collaborative effort between the City of Minneapolis Elections office and DesignWorks to create a package of shareable voting signage, utilizing simplified design best-practices, which resulted in the State of Minnesota adopting the group of designs for statewide use. As the point person on the project, Kate provided excellent leadership and enabled a seamless, efficient, and utterly enjoyable experience!"