Designers in Khanversation
It’s deeply gratifying to serve Khan Academy’s mission and help students and teachers all over the world. But one of the greatest joys in my role is supporting this amazing design team. Not only are they highly skilled and just all around wonderful people, but they’ve chosen to dedicate their chops to the cause of creating a more equitable world through education. They are critical thinkers who constantly inspire me to work toward being a better human.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series to give you a glimpse of our designers in conversation with each other. They paired up and asked each other questions like:
- How did you get into design?
- What does the design world need more of?
- Who are some people that inspire you?
- What’s something you’ve been learning about recently?
We hope you’ll be inspired by the stories and the incredible variety.
The team spans about twenty years in age and a wide array of backgrounds in every sense. We were brought into this world by people from 🇲🇽 Mexico, 🇩🇰 Denmark, 🇮🇳 India, 🇨🇴 Colombia, 🇹🇭 Thailand, 🇩🇪 Germany, 🇳🇱 the Netherlands, 🇹🇼 Taiwan, 🇪🇬 Egypt, 🇮🇩 Indonesia, 🇧🇩 Bangladesh, 🇯🇵 Japan, 🇵🇭 the Philippines, 🇧🇷 Brazil, 🇵🇰Pakistan, 🇺🇦 Ukraine and 🇺🇸 the United States. We have people who’ve been designing for iPhones for over 10 years, and people who were working in a mailroom on an hourly wage as recently as 7 years ago. From James Baldwin to J Balvin, Yayoi Kusama to Yuri Kochiyama, bell hooks to Beauty and the Beast, Ariana Grande to Algernon Cadwallader to Aphex Twin to Aya Nakamura, we have fans of it all.
I love this variety. It’s a natural defense against groupthink and natural fodder for creativity. It makes both our team and our lives richer.
People don’t expect to find this level of design talent in a not-for-profit. Nor do they expect to find this much diversity in a world class team! We think the future of design teams is bright: highly diverse, highly skilled in collaboration and craft, and working toward a deeper cause.
“Khan Academy is blessed with a highly talented and skilled design team” — Ginny Lee, COO and President at Khan Academy
“This is the most talented design team I’ve ever worked with” — Karen White, Director, Product Management at Khan Academy
“Holy shit your team is amazing” — Linda Dong, Design Manager at Lyft
This series started thanks to Helena Jaramillo taking the kernel of an idea and running with it. We hope you’ll enjoy the Khanversations as much as we did! Look out for the first post next week.
P.S. We’re hiring, if you’re interested, check out our job listings!
Links to the series
👉🏽 Elizabeth and Vivek talk about sneakers, fashion, capitalism, how they got into design (they even share some vintage work) and MORE. These two have incredible taste BTW I always want to know where they look
👉🏽 Louis and Erica on rearranging the furniture, skeuomorphic icons, working in the federal government and more
👉🏽 Cassey and Jacob on how neuropsychology, being an executive assistant, and not wanting to draw Mickey Mouse 1000 times could lead to a career in design
👉🏽 Priya and I in conversation about Hypercard, Mariah Carey, and Priya’s inspiring journey from being a receptionist to being a product designer
