Representation matters. Even in the abstract world of illustration.
Is the era of the green people in illustration finally over? As illustration has become more popular with online brands, initial attempts to communicate diversity led designers to experiment with turning people into pseudo aliens with green or purple skin. While the intent was good, the representation was flawed. Why shouldn’t illustration represent the beauty and variety of human bodies more accurately?
There are many reasons to prioritize this work, but here are a few:
Your choices have an impact. Creators and collaborators bear the responsibility of the people chosen to be showcased in visuals. You can literally visualize any person in illustration, and an illustrator can decide to use that ability to recognize a wider breadth of people, including underrepresented and marginalized communities. When illustrations help create a more inclusive experience, your customers are more likely to participate in more diverse conversations and connections.
It can really mean a lot, to a lot of people. If you are accustomed to seeing people who look like you shown in visuals, this might not seem like a big deal. But if you are someone whose likeness has been largely omitted from a visual medium, it really matters when you actually see a visual that helps you feel seen. For our diverse community at Goodreads, it is critical to create breadth of illustrations that speaks to our 135 million readers all over the world.
It’s easy to illustrate more inclusively, immediately. Start with simple considerations that you could do today, and then continue to learn and build as an ongoing journey.
Our (ongoing) journey
This topic is a deep, continuing, educational process for us. In this post, we’d like to share two impactful learnings from our journey so far: starting with skin tone, and challenging biases.
Start with skin tone
By grounding illustrations with a skin tone palette reflecting the reality of how people actually look, we immediately can contribute to a visual experience that can feel more inclusive for people who have historically been underrepresented and marginalized.
To standardize illustrations of people with realistic skin tones, we established a color palette based on the Fitzpatrick Scale, a medical scale measuring the skin’s biological response to ultraviolet light. It’s a recognized standard for dermatology and makeup manufacturers, and is referenced by many brand illustration systems. This informed the palette for illustrating skin tones, to help us be more inclusive, realistic and representational.
Illustrating people more inclusively starts with a realistic set of skin tones as a baseline. But those swatches are just the beginning, which lead into the myriad of additional inclusive considerations that we address next.
Challenge your biases
We all have unconscious biases and our media consumption can exacerbate or challenge them. I remember talking with a colleague about how surprised she was watching an episode of Bodyguard, in which a bomb disposal agent and train guard were both female. Her surprise was quickly followed by another ah-ha moment of her own biases. To counter these kinds of stereotypes, we have the opportunity to be deliberate in our choices of how individuals are portrayed.
The challenge, though, is how to move from good intentions to creating mechanisms that break our biases. There are so many considerations to keep in mind when illustrating human beings, so we came up with a list of some specific questions to ask ourselves during the creative process. This questionnaire is a forcing function for us to really consider our day-to-day design decisions, expanding the breadth of people that our illustrations are representing.
We socialized this questionnaire with other collaborators in Marketing, Editorial, Product, Revenue and PR — empowering more people to contribute additional perspectives and ideas on how an illustration could be more inclusive.
It further encourages open questioning of our visuals for potential bias and insensitivity in how each individual is illustrated, assessing if characteristics such as hair color or texture are grounded in how people of a portrayed skin tone actually look in the real world. It also results in a more mindful creative process that watches out for stereotypical social dynamics, questioning who is cast in a position of empowerment or as a main character.
This checklist helps us to more closely examine, iterate and improve each time we illustrate people. For example, when the team reviewed an illustration of an author, we referenced the checklist to challenge potential bias in creative choices. Does the character’s wardrobe reinforce any stereotypes? We’ve illustrated a lot of younger looking people lately — could this illustration portray a less-represented age range? How can we be more inclusive of different physical abilities — they are currently standing up, but could they be sitting down?
As shown below, these additional perspectives and questions made a significant impact on this particular illustration. And with these processes and tools, we can continuously strive to think more inclusively every time we create an illustration.
Inclusive reads & listens, from Goodreads’ design and research team
At Goodreads, one of our core values is Always Be Learning, Always Be Teaching, so we can’t resist ending with recommendations that we’ve recently read or listened to:
Design Better: The power of inclusive design
Recommended by Erik Homsapaya, senior art director
This is a podcast episode that I revisited while thinking about our inclusive illustration guidelines. It’s a fantastic story of Benjamin Evan’s unique journey in inclusive design, but is also shares a lot of insights and thoughtful points of view that I found really inspirational, and empowering for the work we do as designers, but also along with everyone else who is collaborating with design. This quote in particular really resonated with me: “Anyone from different groups, whether it be designers or marketers or business leaders, I try to encourage them, ‘Just ask, who are you missing?’ And you’ll start to get some very interesting insights that you can act on and change your teams and change your ways of thinking and build more inclusive products and services for all.”
You Can’t Be Serious by Kal Penn
Recommended by Whitney Patel, senior design researcher
Highly recommend the audiobook as it is narrated by him and all the more touching and hilarious. Kal’s comedic talents shine in his storytelling but it doesn’t overshadow the hardships and struggles he faced as an actor of color trying to get a break in Hollywood. Hearing stories of how he challenged the racist institutions is inspiring. It was a strong reminder that all of us can support diversity in entertainment by seeking out content that breaks white-washed Hollywood traditions. Kal’s time with the Obama administration was also extremely interesting to learn about. His passions for drama and social-activism are explored and he recounts how they can exist together rather than being at odds.
Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace by Jessica Bennett
Recommended by Alana Lindner, head of design and research
A humorous yet incisive guide to navigating “subtle” sexism at work. I read this years ago after being the only female in leadership and had a good cry and laugh at the same time. It identifies behaviors that even I was unaware of and calls them out in a kind of over the top but real way. It’s a reminder of how far we’ve come in the workplace and how much further we need to push, educate, speak up and build allies.
‘The danger of a single story’ TED talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Recommended by Brooke Ginnard, brand and visual product designer
A powerful and compelling talk from author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (“Americanah,” “Half of a Yellow Sun”) about the dangers of letting a single story define a person, or a group of people. As Adiche says, “when we show people as only one thing, over and over again, that is what they become.” As a designer whose storytelling is often visual, for me this talk underscored the responsibility of designers to critically examine what we create to ensure we visually represent and design for a diversity of experiences, and help elevate realities that are often underrepresented in the mainstream narrative.
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Recommended by Karen Liu, lead product designer
This book is one that keeps hanging in the back of my mind despite finishing it awhile ago. Reading about the school-to-prison pipeline and learning about America’s system of mass incarceration gave me a different perspective on what we think of as “criminals,” “thugs,” and people who deserve to be in prison. Spoiler: lots of people are in prison who don’t deserve it, and cops aren’t always morally upright forces of good. Anyone who wants to become more inclusive of those with different backgrounds and experiences should give book a try — it’ll lift a lens and you’ll never be able to see the world the same way again.
Revision Path podcast
Recommended by Haley Giangreco, visual designer
Revision Path™ is one of my favorite podcasts, hosted by Maurice Cherry: principle and creative director of Lunch. These award-winning weekly episodes “showcase Black designers, artists, developers, and digital creatives from all over the world.” In fact, this is the first podcast to be added to the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. These episodes offer an amazing opportunity to get inspired and learn from another person’s narrative, no matter your creative discipline. Learning from the experiences of black folks in design, has helped me broaden my perspectives as a visual designer. It’s also helped me understand how to better represent often underrepresented voices in design. This podcast is a true celebration of black creatives and highlights enormous contributions that often go overlooked in historically white industries. This platform creates a much needed space for black creatives to showcase “their work, their goals, and what inspires them as creative individuals.”
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Recommended by Julie Lockhart, senior product designer
Since I did not grow up in the U.S., I know I missed many American history lessons but I believe the stories in this book are not always shared (or with this lens) in the classroom. Isabel Wilkerson examines the dark caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings, that has shaped America. Through narrative and story she shows how our daily lives are still shaped and influenced by this hierarchy. This book was another learning for me; revealing more of the history and long tentacles of racism in America. I have a better understanding of U.S. race relations by looking at race through the lens of a caste, and have hope in people moving beyond the devisions and focusing on our common humanity.
