Hue Design Summit 2018

The un-conference for creatives of color

A few weeks ago, we hosted our second Hue Design Summit, here in Atlanta at the Howard House. With last year being our first go at the summit, we wanted to test the waters to see if this idea, this event, had any need. This year, it’s safe to say that we may be on to something with this number surpassing 35 total attendees.

The theme of this year’s summit was Design Heritage: Past, Present, and Future. We really wanted to reiterate this concept throughout all of our events and talks for the weekend. It really started with how do define the word “heritage ” as it pertains to creatives of color. One of the surprising things we realized was we need to do a better job of capturing our design pioneers while we still can. Often times, when it comes to design, especially for business, we always look to the future, but to make sure we know where we headed, we need to ensure we know where we’re coming from.

Events

Thursday

We started the Summit with a welcome dinner that was prepared by a private chef that we worked with at last year’s summit in Chef Jermaine. The meal that was prepared was [insert food here]. One of the wonderful things about having a collective served by different design disciplines, we were able to create a dinner table experience that only someone with a background in wedding event planning could pull off. With Friday being the first official day of the summit, Thursday was finished off by candid conversations and cocktails.

Friday

Friday kicked off the real events of the weekend with a presentation by the fantastic Gail Anderson, design, writer, and educator based in New York. She showed how your early youth can drive your motivations for your design career. Every eye was glued to Gail as she walked us through all of the things that made her design career what it is today.

A catered lunch allowed for the Summit attendees to get ready for our next presenter for the day in Mahdi Woodard. He spoke on his ascendence in the corporate marketing world for the Mars Company. The capstone of the presentation was we are too powerful to create for others, and not for us. He left the room with more than enough quotables to carry with us in any endeavor we might have in the months or years.

To finish Friday, a few of us went to a Paint & Sip studio hosted by Yani Paints. If you’re looking to have an incredible time with a few people, that don’t mind rolling up their creatives sleeves, this is the place to do it!

Saturday

The second official day of the Summit was started with a yoga session to help some of the attendees decompress. It’s always good to release any stresses we may have (knowingly or unknowingly), mainly as creatives so that we can produce our best work uninhibited.

This year, we created a session for anonymous Q&A. This is the attendees could write down a question, submit it and the moderator would read it allowed for dialogue amongst the room. The topics ranged from how to price your work (always a hot topic in any room), your design workflow, to what designers of colors do you consider pioneers of their craft. The last question was one where a few of us, myself included, had to take a moment and realize that we don’t celebrate the ones that have come before us enough. This is where the theme of the summit started to pour through.

The speakers for the day [ need someone to discuss, wasn’t present ].

Sunday

As the summit came to a close, we had the privilege of hearing AND experience Kai’s presentation. Personally, Kai’s presentation exceeded any expectation that I may have had and reaffirmed why it’s good to learn “non-designers” to better your overall perspective. Kai’s specialty is using virtual reality (mixed or augmented) to help make history accessible. I can say with 100% conviction that the experience that she was able to provide thru placing us into a historical context left everyone speechless. We found ourselves asking “how do designers play a role with what you’re trying to capture?”

The most straightforward answer is we seldom have experiences that are designed in our likeness. An example of this is how often we see white hands in place of our blacks hands (for picking and up grasping things) when we have a virtual experience. Tying back into the summit theme, who will tell our stories? Who will tell share our perspectives?

Conversations

Some of the biggest takeaways that are created at this summit are the authentic conversations that pop up between speakers sessions or over lunch/dinner. It’s difficult to describe what these talks represent because there’s no real place for them (as of today) in an office environment. Most of the conversations feel as if it’s a mentor-mentee relationship but each person involved in the talks can fit either role. Some of these conversations include combating imposter’s syndrome, how to navigate the corporate as a person of color, do you minimize your blackness in an otherwise, white space?

When we initially created the summit, the conversations were an afterthought to pass the time really. However, it’s these talks that typically provide the space for the most growth. In these conversations, there’s a level of transparency that exists that’s hard to capture in a room of 25. That level of trust and confidence that is built in that first sidebar creates a willingness to be engaged with larger group sizes. Every individual at this event knows something you don’t, and it breeds opportunities for growth that few of us can quantify. This is really the essence of why the Summit was created to begin with — how do we get in a room and have those safe space conversations amongst other designers of color?

Closing Out

It’s become a tradition to take a little time off before we plan for the next year’s Summit. However, this year we’ve decided to add smaller events throughout the remainder of the year to maintain that community feel (stay connected, build with one another, etc.) We learned last year, that staying in contact with one another beyond our designer lives create a friendship and authenticity that yields excellent results when something other than design is the topic of conversation.

As we continue to grow and improve the Hue Design Summit and the Collective as a whole, we invite other design organizations and design teams on established companies to join us. We seek to improve not only the overall numbers in workspaces, startups, communities, but we also want to increase our impact as well. This doesn’t happen without the help of others, this doesn’t happen without you. We are most appreciative of the partners that helped make the 2018 Summit possible and we look forward to a continued relationship in the years to come.

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @huedesignsummit. We’ll continue to share updates, events, tips, and all things design. If you’d like to reach out to us via email, you can reach us hi@huedesignsummit.com