WOMEN IN DESIGN AND MULTIMEDIA

Green Fashionista posted a really great comment this week regarding her noticing the gender inequality at the Pentagram design firm: "I find it interesting that only 2 of the 17 partners at Pentagram are female..."

On the eve of the New Year, I think this is an important topic to consider in going forward into 2009 and beyond. Six years ago when I started teaching in the Design department at Butte, it was immediately clear how wide the gender gap was between men and women taking classes or going for degrees in our Graphic Design and Multimedia Design programs. At best, one out of fifteen of the students attending classes were women. The percentages are often larger now, but still far below what they should be. Where the percentages have gotten higher is in the Graphic Design classes (typography, Intro to Graphic Design), but not the Multimedia classes (Flash, Web Design).

Here is an example of what I often see:
In my Careers in Multimedia class this coming Spring 09 semester, two of the twenty-seven students enrolled are women.
In my Typography class, nine of the twenty-one students are women.
In my Intro to Multimedia Production class, two of the twenty-one students are women.

Just this small sampling of my own classes is troubling on many different levels. Where are the women that should be going into Web design and Multimedia industries? What is happening in high school design classes? Are young women being directed away from multimedia or just not being informed of the opportunities? What will the high-tech design industry gender-gap be like ten or twenty-years from now?

Graphic Design focusing on print is a great industry for a career, but statistics show that Web designers, Web developers, and Multimedia designers on average make higher wages than Graphic Designers who limit their skills to print design.

Here are a few statistics from the AIGA's salary survey results for 2008. These are the lower end of the scale:
Solo Designer (can be print and Web) $40,000
Graphic Designer: $38,000
Web Designer: $44,000
Web Developer: $50,000
Web Producer: $60,000

There is a glass ceiling in many areas where women and men work the same jobs, but imagine how low that ceiling will be when the majority of high-end Web and Multimedia designers are men. Kottke.org has an interesting piece on Gender diversity at Web Conferences

In the Design Observer, a well-known design site (edited by Michael Bierut, a Pentagram NY Partner, and also edited by Jessica Helfand and William Drenttel of Winterhouse design studio), Drenttel wrote of a recent flag design competition hosted by Adbusters magazine. Drenttel's point of the article was to show a gender discrimination on the jury, which was comprised of 7 jurors, all of them white males. He noted that all the jurors were respected and qualified designers, but wrote "…how did we get to the point where a jury was formed with no representation from a larger, more diverse community?"

It's a good article, but more important to me are the number of posts and comments to this article that followed, mostly by men, who are not able to, or do not want to grasp the idea of equality or the inequality in the design industries.

Another great article in the Design Observer by Michael Bierut can be found here inThe Graphic Glass Ceiling. Read the quote from Milton Glaser and follow the links to the Gothamist for more info.

Here is a great article on Zeldman.com. "Women in Web design: just the stats." In this article regarding IT workers (not specifically Web designers or graphic designers), three items emerge:

• Men outnumber women in this workforce by over three to one.
• The percentage of women employed in the field is declining instead of growing.
• Women who participate in the field may not be promoted as often or as high as their male colleagues.

The article is definitely worth reading.

Back here at Butte, in our own design department, you'll notice that we have no women teaching classes as Associate faculty in either the Graphic Design or Multimedia programs. This has been a major concern for me since I started teaching. Every time I meet a woman designer who is qualified to teach, I almost beg them to consider teaching a class or two for us. As you can see, my attempts at recruiting still haven't paid off for our students. And to me, this is the most important element of not having women design instructors in our program. I believe that without a mix of women and men teaching in our programs, we are doing a disservice to our students. How can we show that the design industry is a viable opportunity for women, when we don't have women designers teaching our classes and showing the students this is true?

This should give you all some information to think about in the coming year. Let's see what changes we can make. If you know a talented woman designer who may like to teach, send her our way.

Here are the links for today:
Women of Design. A new book I just purchased a couple of weeks ago. Great book!
Women Designer's Group

and just a few of the women designers I admire:

April Greiman
Bonnie Siegler and Emily Oberman
Jennifer Morla
Margo Chase
Amy Franceschini

See you in the new year.

-daniel

DESIGNING INTO THE NEW YEAR

It's just a few days before the New Year, and as I sit here surfing from site-to-site and seeing all of the amazing designers and design sites I keep coming across and bookmarking on my DELICIOUS, I wonder how many of our students and faculty are designing during the break?

During that first week back to school every semester, I ask students how many designed something, or who played with design software during the break, and the number of hands raised is sad. Usually, it's only one out of ten or less that actually did something design-oriented during their off-time.

I hear from so many of our students that they want to be designers, illustrators, photographers or multimedia producers, but many of them are caught-up in the get-rich-quick, reality-TV, dot-com millionaire concept of making it big fast, without having to work hard and build their way to becoming great designers. Let me tell you now, it's not going to happen. The way you become a great designer is by working your butt off and learning how to manage a business and people, by putting yourself in the right place at the right time, and by looking at design and making it happen every day.

So, start now and create something. Design today and tomorrow, and the next day. Don't stop until school starts again, and even then, keep up your own projects while doing school work!

For anyone checking this blog during the break, here's an assignment for you, go to CROWDSPRING, sign-up for free, and take on a project and upload it to the site. Begin building your portfolio now, so you have some content when you graduate.

Here's a site for a design firm that all design students and design faculty should know about: PENTAGRAM. If you haven't browsed the firm's work, then take the time now to do so. I also suggest you head over to the HILLMAN CURTIS Web site and view his short interviews with Pentagram and other well-known designers. Be sure to view the Philip Glass, Stefan Sagmeister, Paula Scher, Milton Glaser, David Carson and Pentagram videos

Here are a few links that I think are worth looking at:

Design is Kinky (not what you think)

Wooster Collective (street art)

Imaginary Friends Studios

View the three links above and then let me know what you think about them.

-Daniel

RISD: RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN

If you haven't heard of John Maeda before, now is the time to start doing a bit of research. There's a great interview on the Fast Company Web site. Maeda is the current President of RISD, the Rhode Island School of Design.

Maeda's background includes BS and MS degrees from MIT, he's considered a world-renowned graphic designer who pioneered the use of computers used for art, and he initiated the Design By Numbers project, a global initiative to teach computer programming to visual artists. Maeda has some important comments regarding students in art and multimedia. Here is a quote from his interview:

"New media requires new people, young people who are masters in using this material. And these people are having a problem now. The problem is they can become extremely wealthy without much effort. They can become wealthy before the age of 25. What is their interest in building schools, an intellectual infrastructure? They have no reason. Where’s the gain? The gain isn’t monetary, and the gain isn’t even status, when you consider the fact that old media tries to kill new media. Oh bad, bad, bad. In that case, why would you waste your time? 

Every cool website that I encounter, I’ll email the people asking if they want to study in the graduate programme at MIT. The usual reply is: ‘I didn’t go to college, I went to art school but the teachers didn’t know anything about this new media stuff. I can just pick it up by myself with my friends.’ There are all these mini-cliques who get together over the Web and talk about new things, but it’s a bit wild right now, like little cults, little packs, and I’m not sure they can formalise into a school per se. 

I don’t believe that we can develop the potential of new media until there is a new type of school. Everybody wants a new school, but there has to be something that happens, something that clicks. I believe it’s about the myth. Unless you have the myth of a great school of thought in new media, you are not going to have great new media. I think about Paul Rand and how he did all that design work and I’m motivated to get off my butt and do something. Unless you have these myths, who’s going to want to get up in the morning?"

An interesting marketing item from RISD is that they are now using START HERE (sound familiar?) as the promotional tagline for fundraising. Check out Maeda's RISD BLOG.

NEW LINKS:

Fresh Bump

Freshbump is a resource and  social news media site for Advertising, Architecture, Computer Arts, Graphic Design, Illustration, Industrial Design, Interior Design, and Photography.

Format Magazine

Format is a great online magazine that features fashion and art culture. Check it out. Issue 52 is their Video Game issue.

BeHance Network

Behance is social design network and free portfolio site where designers apply to be on the site. Once invited by the site managers, designers upload their art and design to portfolios.

-Daniel

WELCOME TO THE ADAD BLOG

Welcome to the Art/Digital Art & Design (ADAD) department's blog. This space is going to become a resource for our students and instructors to discover all of the great things that are happening in the ADAD department. We'll also use the space to feature amazing artists and designers, cool Web sites and resources found while surfing the Web.

First up: A new Mac lab for DAD. Long live the Mac, the Mac Minis are gone. We'll be getting a new desktop Mac lab in SSF 101 this coming Spring. The computers have been ordered along with twenty-six 21" Wacom Cintiq drawing monitors. 

Tell me you're not excited and wishing Winter break was already over so you could start playing with these cool new toys.

I'm going to add links to the best sites I find as I'm surfing each week. Starting now.

NOTCOT

You should be checking this site out every week if not more often to see some of the best links for art, design and tech. 

I'm looking forward to creating a team of designers and instructors who will add to this blog on a regular basis. I've invited a few instructors so far. Let's see who bites.

Have a good one.

-Daniel