It’s a dictum every designer hears at some point during their career, somewhere between “less is more” and “some rules are made to be broken.” The idea is that design should be frictionless — the moment you have to consider the meaning of a sign or a symbol, or guess how to navigate a website, the designer has failed. It’s a rule that separates art from design: While art can be open to interpretation, design necessitates clear, universal understanding.
But how universal can a system be when it’s designed by a fraction of the population? Like in most industries, women and people of color are disproportionately absent from leadership roles in creative fields. And among creative professionals, minorities are also less likely to have art- or design-related degrees. Adobe Principal Designer Khoi Vihn discussed this finding in a recent article, suggesting that young minorities are less likely to be exposed to creative career paths.
While Vihn’s article failed to mention gender diversity in creative fields, he did reference a 2016 American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) survey that provided some insight into the relationship between demographics and salaries in the design industry. Unsurprisingly, women designers make less than men across the board. And while Asian women designers make slightly more on average than all women designers, white women make more than everyone else. (The survey results are worth exploration. You can find a couple screenshots below.)
These disparities stem from a lack of deviation from the status quo, which is inevitably white and male. Design is similar to Silicon Valley and startup culture in its insular tendencies: friends collaborate with friends, who refer them to freelancers they know, who start businesses with creators they graduated with. Before long, you end up with studio after homogenous studio wondering how anyone ever green-lit the Pepsi ad. Even popular online portfolio platforms like Dribbble and Behance — ones that designers (including yours truly) routinely reference when hiring freelancers or new employees — may inadvertently promote men’s work over women’s work.
There are obstacles specific to creative industries that prevent women of color from excelling, but the nature of those obstacles is replicated throughout the entire workforce. For anyone who isn’t white and male, these stumbling blocks are obvious: From sexual harassment to unequal pay to being repeatedly interrupted in meetings, we face them every day, on scales large and small. But for the people in power — arguably, the people who have the power to change it — discrimination is built seamlessly into the framework, and it’s really well designed. To them, it’s invisible.
To succeed within this framework, women and people of color and especially women of color know that they have to overachieve. In this week’s issue of Token we’re featuring women designers of color who do just that.
— Ari, a woman designer of color who has never worked with another woman designer of color.
NATASHA JEN
Born in Taipei, Taiwan, Natasha Jen was one of the youngest people to be named Principal Designer at Pentagram, a world-renowned design agency. Jen’s work spans an impressive range of design disciplines, and she doesn’t have a problem with calling bullshit on some of the industry’s most annoying, buzzword-y tendencies.
DR. NADINE CHAHINE
Design is as much a science as it is an art, and Dr. Nadine Chahine proves it by being the only type designer we know with “Dr.” in front of her name. She is the UK Type Director and Legibility Expert for Monotype, one of the world’s preeminent type foundries, where she focuses on the legibility of Arabic script.
SANDRA GARCIA
One of Sandra Garcia’s first projects as Creative Director for Highline, HuffPost’s longform feature vertical, generated quite a buzz. Sure, it was about millennial demise, but the 8-bit descent into despair captured the (broken) hearts of all who experienced it. Her past design work at FiveThirtyEight and New York Magazine is just as impressive.
Token is a project by Ari Curtis and Natalie Chang that celebrates the work and worth of women of color. Subscribe here to get the latest issues in your inbox.
