Hue Design Summit 2018
The return of the un-conference for creatives of color
In July, the HUE Collective hosted our second annual Hue Design Summit at the Howard House in historic East Atlanta neighborhood of Kirkwood. In 2017, we hosted the first summit, as we wanted to test the waters to see if this event had any need. This year, through learning from last year’s experience and communicating a clearer message on what we can provide, it’s safe to say that we may be on to something with the number of attendees totaling more than 35 designers, illustrators, and creatives.
The theme of this year’s summit was Design Heritage: Past, Present, and Future; we wanted to reiterate this concept throughout all of our events and talks for the weekend. It really started with the question: “How do we 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, and especially for business, we can have tunnel vision in our day-to-day present, and look to the future to be ahead of the curve — but to make sure we know where we are headed, we need to know where we’re coming from.
Events
Thursday
The weekend began with our welcome dinner prepared by Chef Jermaine which included a variety of hearty options for attendees to enjoy buffet style. One of the wonderful things about having a collective served by different design disciplines is that we were able to create a dinner table experience that only someone with a background in wedding event planning could pull off. The dinner was designed to create familiarity and camaraderie among the attendees and speakers as a precursor to the summit so that relationships, conversations and exchanges over the weekend were rooted in a background of trust, understanding and honesty. Following the dinner, we finished the night off with candid conversations and cocktails.
Friday
The summit officially began on Friday 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 presenters for the day, Dayle Bennett and Mahdi Woodard. Our color crafting workshop facilitated by Dayle focused on the usage of Pantone Color of the Year, Ultra Violet.
Pantone describes Ultra Violet’s historical linkage to mystical or spiritual qualities as often associated with mindfulness practices, which offer a higher ground to those seeking refuge from today’s over-stimulated world. The use of purple-tones in meditation spaces and other gathering places energizes the communities that gather there and inspire connection. In this particular session, we focused on Afro-futurism.
Mahdi spoke on his ascendance in the corporate marketing world for the Mars Company. The capstone of the presentation was simply that we are too insightful to create for others, and not for ourselves. In the couple of hours he had with us, he gifted the room with more than enough quotes to carry with us in any endeavor we might have learned from in months or years’ time.
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 creative sleeves and expressing themselves, 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 where the attendees could write down a question, submit it and the moderator would read it aloud for dialogue among the room. Designers were able to broach topics that they may not have been able to bring up in their classes or offices, and various people in the room were able to use their experiences to answer questions or provide alternate schools of thought for all of us to learn from. 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 included UX Design Researcher Rachel Walsh and UX Design Leader Darryl Prince. Attendees were able to experience one group session of their choice as both were taking place simultaneously. Mr. Prince’s presentation focused on Rooting Design Strategy. In marrying the relationships between business, product, and design strategies, companies can activate exponential growth in critical areas over time. As creatives, we were challenged to rethink our approach to the design process and encouraged to understand the value of having a solid design strategy in place.
All good design serves a purpose: it meets an unmet need, eases a task, or solves a problem for the user. However, all the efforts to create good design are wasted if the designers aren’t designing the right solution for the right users. Finding and identifying this critical information through Design Research was the topic of Rachel Walsh’s presentation. Her experience leading hundreds of research projects across dozens of industries provided a strong framework for the key benefits of and considerations for conducting design research:
- Start with empathy for the users.
- Focus on quality over quantity in conducting your discussions.
- Share your findings with others and create a story to help communicate the findings effectively.
- Let your research inform your design decisions.
Using these guidelines will not only provide you better knowledge about the users you design for, but also the best ways to help them and support from fellow designers and stakeholders within your organization.
Afterward, attendees were invited to join the Collective at the Atlanta Ice Cream Festival for treats and lit bites to lighten the mood and get everyone out of the house and into the city. The relationship-building continued there until we reconnected later at the Howard House for board games and sketchbook sharing.
Sunday
As the summit came to a close, we had the privilege of hearing AND experiencing Kai Frazier’s presentation. Kai’s presentation exceeded all expectations and reaffirmed why it’s good to learn from “non-designers” to better your perspective as a designer. Kai’s specialty is using virtual reality (mixed or augmented) to help make history more accessible to the underserved. The experience that she was able to provide through placing us into a historical context left everyone speechless. We found ourselves asking, “How do designers play a role in 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 interacting with a virtual world as a default, instead of our own hands. Tying back into the summit theme, who will tell our stories? Who will tell share our perspectives?
Conversations
Some of the best moments 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 conversations felt as if they were between a mentor and mentee, but each person involved in the talks could fit either role. Some conversations included combating impostor syndrome, navigating the corporate sector as a person of color, and minimizing your blackness in workspaces(!)
When we initially created the summit, the conversations were an afterthought to pass the time — 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 35 or more. The 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 — how do we get in a room and have those safe space conversations among other designers of color in an intimate setting?
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 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, and 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.
