I spent this week working on the banner for the Faculty Commons Monthly banner. This is used as promotional artwork for Faculty Commons monthly newsletter. We are currently working on creating monthly art for the newsletter to create interest for the readers. Though I am not the project lead for these monthly designs I worked on it because the team member assigned to it is not with us for the semester yet. She already created a design for the month in advance, but we received a complaint citing representation issues within the design. I was tasked with resolving the representation issue.
For reference here is her original design:
I met with the original designer and we discussed our thoughts on the matter. We both figured that the representation was a tricky topic to deal with and that in its current form, the design didn’t particularly have a problem as the characters had no skin color and a variation of hairstyles. Despite this, I did see that there was the opportunity to add more characters for representation and fix some hairstyles. Additionally, I figured even though some of the characters’ hairstyles were used by many races, they looked like they could be wrongly perceived to represent caucasians in specific as the models were colored white with mostly straight hair. Due to this I decided to also change the skin colors, but since I did not want them to be too representative of race (which would likely cause another complaint) I instead gave the characters inhuman skin colors.
Ultimately, the change was liked and has gone live at this point.
