Diversity in Design: Making Connections Through Inclusion

Hiring designers from a variety of backgrounds helps keep your content fresh and relevant to new audiences. Learn more about the benefits of diversity for creative design.

When working with designers, once you’ve found a freelance writer or agency you’re comfortable with, it’s easy to dig with them and whatever the file, get back to them for all your creative needs. On the surface, this makes perfect sense. Why would you go through the long process of building an entirely new relationship, if the one you’ve already established is working so well?

The point is, this method of working is not as efficient as you might think.

Today we are exploring an alternative way of working with designers who promote diversity and inclusion. Moreover, this process ultimately leads to a better outcome for your business.

The current state of affairs

When you think of a designer, what image do you conjure up in your mind? A young white man, in a cafeteria with his laptop, ordering white dishes adorned with expensive coffee art, perhaps? It may sound incredibly cliché, but stereotypes exist for a reason.

The hard, cold truth of the matter is that 86% of professional designers in America are white, and 75% of them are men. Therefore, this mental caricature that we have created is likely to be close to target.

And this leads to a vital problem for business.

When it comes to choosing a designer to work with, the pool of potential talent is vast in terms of the actual number of designers. But, if a significant percentage of them are from the same demographic, it is likely that their views, perspectives and attitudes towards your project are not very different from individual to individual. After all, their experiences and their way of life are quite similar.

Since working with a designer is being able to generate a new way of thinking about something, usually with the aim of giving you the edge over your competition, you can quickly understand why a lack of diversity leads to a lack. innovation. The last thing you want is to look and feel like everyone else.

But that’s not all bad news. Despite these rather steep statistics, not all designers are white men. In fact, in the past five years alone, there have been more entrants into the industry of non-white men than ever before, especially women, BIPOCs (Blacks, Aboriginals and people of color) and members. of the LGBTQ + community.

Diversity breeds diversity

Improve your offer

Working with a wide variety of designers improves your business overall. By giving an opportunity to a designer from a totally different background than yours, you open the door to a whole world that you may never have known before. This cross-pollination of experiences effectively doubles the number of ideas you can generate among yourselves. It’s a win-win, as you and the designer have the chance to immerse yourself in new and exciting territory. As our horizons broaden and we develop a better understanding of the vast array of ways of living as humans, we can begin to understand that other cultures and traditions are extremely valuable and inherently important to us. design and business.

Doubling the number of ideas leads to a much larger pool of possibilities for your next project. This increase in innovation has a direct impact on the way you work, the way you market yourself and ultimately the number of sales you make. At worst, you’ve come up with entirely new ideas; at best, you could end up opening up a whole new market.

Improve your opportunities

And that leads to the next point. Sometimes, as business owners, we fall into the trap of thinking that every customer is the same as the next. However, this causes problems for your business. This mindset prevents you from speaking directly to each customer on a personal level. In reality, each of the people you hope to reach has totally different experiences and totally different values.

If you’ve been focusing on a similar target market for a while and the traction isn’t as high as you would like or is potentially on the way out, just employing a designer from a community or from a different background can have a profound effect. about your business. Shifting gears allows you to reach whole new communities, as the designer can reflect specifically on their experiences and bring them into the project in an authentic and organic way. They may have a better understanding of the cultural cues, colloquial language, or design aesthetics that appeal most to these communities.

Improve your network

As a small business owner, your network is extremely important. Without it, your pipeline runs dry. Working with a designer from a different background opens the door to developing contacts that you might otherwise have ignored or didn’t know existed. This could have a huge impact on your business as entirely new communities will become aware of you and a whole new frontier of potential business opportunities will open up for you.

Improve your leadership skills

Finally, on a more human level, collaborating with diversity in mind allows you to grow as a person. Challenge yourself to accept the views and attitudes of others will improve your ability to interact with a wider range of people, providing a positive feedback loop when it comes to networking, selling and leading a business. team. This will allow you to be much more critical about your thinking, your biases and will help you bring new voices into the conversation.

More than a checkbox

Design is a beautiful thing. With the right designer, he has the ability to generate something from scratch by developing a small idea into a winning campaign. This in itself can often be enough for some business owners. I would say, however, that collaborating with the same designer over and over does no good for you or the designer. The constant requirement to iterate, to come up with even bigger and better ideas is a difficult task, especially when the same two people are involved every time.

The next time you have a project in mind, before you jump into speed dialing, consider bringing in new talent, especially in a context different from your own. This one-time step can have a dramatic effect on your creative process, which in turn could have a significant impact on you and your business. And if that works, developing relationships with more diverse designers is the next logical step.

Diversity is more than a checkbox. In a diverse world, diversity is a requirement.

Cover image by Nadia Snopek.

Find out why representation matters and how you can make your designs more inclusive: