Celebrating the African-American Practitioners Absent From Way Too Many Classroom Lectures by Madeleine Morley, Eye on Design, 2018, and Typography as a Radical Act in an Industry Ever-dominated by White Men by Silas Munro, Eye on Design, 2019, Design Gets More Diverse by Alice Rawsthorn, NYTimes, 2011.
From these readings what stood out to me, the most was knowing how big the lack of representation is in the design field. I was aware of this to a certain extent because like one of the articles mentions we learn about many designers but most of them are white until we dig deeper to find out about POC designers you really see how there is almost no information. I had a similar issue with a project, I was doing research about Lourdes Zolezzi who is a Mexican designer and there wasn’t a lot of information even though her works have been around the world. This is one of the difficulties that P.O.C designers face in that in my opinion they don’t get the recognition that they deserve for what they do and contribute to the field. I think since we have social media and many designers are there, we should try to support and share their work so they can get the recognition they deserve. I think social media has a problem that sometimes P.O.C. creators get shadow banned (meaning their content doesn’t get pushed out so other people can see it and find it) so sometimes you have to actively look for P.O.C creators but I think that is something we need to do and when we find them we should support their work.
Another issue is the lack of access to the tools to become a designer, now there is more accessible because of technology it can still be some people. In the corporate space of design, there is more diversity now because more people are having access to the tools and there is more effort to include P.O.C designers. We sometimes aren’t able to see this unless the designer is able to express their background through their design. I think it was interesting how Seal named his typefaces and how he made them because he knew there weren’t other people like him making time. I think now there are more P.O.C designers who are also doing that and pushing for more diversity in the field and highlighting past designers.
In the past, there haven’t been many presentations in design history class and now we realize that is a big issue there might be more representation in the future. In design history in 20 years there would probably be more talk about P.O.C designers and LGBTQ+ designers because right now there is more diversity in design, hopefully, that would be shown in history. Maybe there could be some discussions about why there wasn’t as much diversity and how that started to change over the years. The commercial design field might change when there is more diversity, even though there is some now there is still room for improvement. I also think that there might be a shift in commercial design because of how for years now there has been a lot of focus on modern design and simplicity, there could be designers who might feel like they want to change we do design to make designs that are more maximalist since modern design can be minimal. I think because of the internet there might be some things like memes that might influence design, some memes that have been popular are usually ironic or have very specific references and that may be shown in the design. I don’t know but usually, when so a specific style had been widely used or is very popular there is a reaction to it in design and some times is the opposite of what has been very popular.
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