good:
Senior Editorial Designer Dylan C. Lathrop writes on the need to change the growing boys club mentality in design:
Graphic design is, by and large, a boys’ club. Of course, if you were to survey practicing male designers, you’d find an abundance of guys that wouldn’t identify as sexist. But personal beliefs don’t always translate to how we work, and that’s an issue that needs to be addressed. Female designers still struggle to feel comfortable in their profession and recognized for their work.
Recently two separate incidents made this point clear: the launch ofMOMENTUS, a visualization of important moments in U.S. history curated by Evan Stremke, and the Weapons of Mass Creation Fest, a three-day event held in Cleveland, sort of a SXSW for design. These projects are great because they challenge designers and highlight their work, but both suffered from the same glaring flaw.
With MOMENTUS, the failure to include women has been acknowledged(though not on the project’s home page). I reached out to Stremke to ask how it came to pass that he did not have a single female designer or illustrator in a project that has 30 pieces. His reasoning was one that is common among creative people that curate this type of project: He wanted to work with his friends and didn’t realize that gender imbalance would be an issue. Both things I can forgive, for sure, but neither one is good for design.
