The Challenges of Being a Black Designer in Corporate America

(updated in August 2021 from the original July 2020 Essay)
If you are African-American in any of the disciplines of graphic design, web design, user interface design, or industrial design, being African-American in today’s modern workplace offers its own unique challenges.

Despite some progress over the years, only 3 percent of designers across all of the design disciplines in the United States are African American.

This is due to a number of factors, from everything to the cutting of art programs in predominantly Black schools, no one actively encouraging young Black folks to go into design, to major design firms like Frog or IDEO not actively recruiting at HBCU campuses that have amazing design programs like Florida A&M and North Carolina A&T.

Unfortunately, in many districts arts education has borne the brunt of funding cuts as school districts made changes to accommodate No Child Left Behind policies, and then in the wake of cutbacks during the Great Recession of the late 2000s. The difficulty in maintaining arts education continues in an environment of severe teacher shortages. Cuts to the arts come at a time when the creativity and mode of thinking that arts education fosters is perhaps most needed by students. They must navigate a competitive higher…