Embracing our truths: Reflections a year after the death of George Floyd
BLOG SERIES
Last May the death of George Floyd stung many across the country and around the world. Although incidents of racial injustice are not novel, the timing of Floyd’s murder in the midst of a global pandemic and economic uncertainty brought new pain. Fortunately, they also sparked deeper conversations at home and in the workplace. Like many other companies, we at Equinox Media were challenged to examine our own record both internally and in the larger community we serve. This process has been rewarding, difficult, at times uncomfortable, but necessary. In a 4-part blog series we give you a look into how we at Equinox Media have been affected by the murder of George Floyd as well as how we hope to be a part of affecting longlasting change toward racial justice.
PART FOUR
Written by: Lensay Abadula
Founded only two years ago, Equinox Media’s early days consisted of a small team. Since its inception, the number of roles and positions have grown exponentially. Although diversity in hiring has always been important, the events of last summer highlighted the need to refocus and revamp internal goals towards compositional diversity.
Within this last year, Black hires have increased throughout all areas of the organization, including teams that directly shape the look and feel of our core products. I recently chatted with two newer hires on the design team, Design Director Amanda George and UX Design Director Graeme Richardson, about their roles and the importance of Black leadership in design. As a member of the design team and a Black creative myself, I was excited to learn of their journeys in the field.
Thank you for joining me and sharing your story. To start off, where did you grow up?
AMANDA: I’m Trinidadian by birth. I moved to the U.S. when I was 7. I essentially grew up in Jamaica, Queens.
GRAEME: I was born and raised in Jamaica, West Indies. I moved to the country when I was 10 and started attending fifth grade here. I primarily grew up in Brooklyn, both in Lefferts Gardens and also in Canarsie, and spent most of my childhood and teenage years there.
What led you to pursue design?
AMANDA: I was in media planning for about seven years. I worked for the Campbell Soup Company, Lincoln Mercury, and L’Oréal Beauty. I worked for a lot of packaged goods in the beauty and automotive industry. [After] five years I was like, I don’t want to do this anymore–I didn’t know what else to do.
I came across two guys who were really awesome designers and it opened up the possibilities of being a visual designer for me. I found, my friend actually found, a school called Shillington, and I decided I was going to go ahead and pursue this new career. I came out of school with no contacts and wrote letters to 50 different agencies. The hustle was real.
GRAEME: My journey started with a graphic design concentration in college and that was my first introduction to what we would now consider traditional design work, which was graphic design for print. I worked on magazine spreads, I worked at local newspapers, and I started doing some light website work as well, which at the time was essentially designing a PDF or a flyer for the website. Web design was very static back then. I went from fine arts to web design to interaction design. I started getting involved in programming languages, learning HTML CSS, Java, and did quite a bit of work with flash and ActionScript as well.
My first really big job was at MTV around 2009, and that was when I really started getting my feet wet in the UX field. We were working on very complex systems that involved users being able to vote for some of our award shows on MTV that were real life events, as well. So, uploading a simple design to the website and having a couple of tap-through states wouldn’t cut it and we really had to understand the minds of our users.
How would you describe your design personality?
AMANDA: In my apartment, in my life, the way I dress, and the way I present myself — it’s almost like a sophisticated minimalism. I design with restraint and I like to think about things being very muted and very minimal, an aesthetic that’s really crisp and premium. That would be my design personality. It’s like Swiss, but not. It’s Swiss, but with a bit of flavor and a bit of soul.
GRAEME: I would say very open and inclusive. Over the years what I’ve learned is that everyone has an eye for design. They have their own idea of what design means to them and they’re all valid.
How would you say your identity as a Black person has impacted your design work?
AMANDA: Well, I design inclusively. I think about the end user. I think about the state of mind of the consumer or the user. I design with a lot of empathy. Yes, I’m here for beautiful aesthetics, but is it functional?
I don’t consider myself a visual designer anymore, which I know is probably controversial, but I consider myself more of a hybrid who does visual design and also understands UX — I like to call myself a product designer. It also comes back to a lot of the consumer insights work that I used to do when I was a media planner.
GRAEME: A lot of my identity over the years I’ve actually tried to remove from my design process and really start — especially in the user experience design field — to think more like a scientist. Earlier in my career it was really about having something be bold and flashy and loud and expressive because that’s naturally how I am. Later in my career, I’m really more about studying people and their behaviors and understanding people, formulating hypotheses and testing them over and over, and analyzing the results and working in collaboration with different teams.
What micro and/or macro aggressions have you faced as a Black designer?
AMANDA: Macro would be … once in my career someone made a comment — it was so weird. It was like this situation where they asked to take a picture of me. The person [wanted] to show their mom that they have Black friends.
The minor ones would be when someone cuts you off in a meeting, but sometimes people don’t really realize what they’re doing. Somebody saying something dumb about your hair, that type of stuff–or someone calling you the wrong name.
Certain people are just not used to seeing someone like you at the table, and that can happen sometimes. Maybe not getting picked for an assignment because you don’t have the same camaraderie as another one of your male colleagues. That’s happened before, but you can’t prove it. None of these things you can prove. It’s difficult to articulate. That’s why there is attrition in our industry, because you get tired of always talking about these things. You get tired of bringing them up. It’s super uncomfortable bringing them up.
I know I’m a Black designer, but I don’t want to only be a Black designer. We are already carrying so much. I want to be looked at for excellent craft, excellent leadership skills. I want to be looked at for keeping my team happy and healthy.
I really feel like sexism is a greater issue in the design field than racism. I really, really do. It’s by design the lack of female leadership industry-wide. The 3% Conference was started because of that. A lot of times at those conferences, they often talk about white women and people of color, so all people of color get lumped in. That really makes me crazy because people like us are at the intersection of those things, so where are we?
GRAEME: I’ve definitely faced a lot of macro, micro, outward discrimination, as well. Often Black designers, Black people, may be looked upon as less intelligent. They are also sometimes looked at as more social or artistic based on media. Going into some of my jobs, I always have to try to make sure that I’m discussing the process around my design work so I’m not just seen as a Black, creative, expressive person. I’m making sure that my thought process, my background, and the process of the entire design is being told.
Job hunting can be difficult, as well. There’s typically not a lot of Black leaders in the design field and that can start from the senior level, director level, all the way up. Even if they have a few directors, you typically don’t see a lot of Black and Brown people above that title.
When was your first leadership position in design?
AMANDA: A better question is how long have I felt like a leader because I’ve felt like a leader for the last eight years. I’ve been working with teams and running my teams with empathy. I gained managerial skills years ago when I was a media planner. I’ve felt like a leader for a while, I just couldn’t take action on it until roles like [my current position]. It was very difficult to be a leader when I was freelancing because I was kind of in and out.
When you’re a designer no one teaches you how to be a leader. [Also] male leaders are the ones making these decisions and people can tend to be more gracious of men than they are of women. Women have to prove themselves and men are given opportunities to just be. Men are hired on their potential and women have to prove things very often. Understanding this now, I try to make sure I’m not that type of leader. I know the biases that occur and I don’t want that to be reflected.
GRAEME: Being a designer I’ve always considered myself a leader regardless of the companies I’ve worked for and what my position was. That helped me a lot–just having that mindset because even if you’re not given that title of the leader, you’re still owning your roles and responsibilities within the team and it is your responsibility to lead that effort.
I had to manage up quite a bit in my career because, going back to my college experience, the technology around me really started progressing–meaning websites, phones, and apps, around 2009. I was young and was able to have the time and education, especially going back to grad school, to really be heads down and study all of these emerging trends and technological advances while they were happening. A lot of my managers at that time were not aware of the trends happening or they were already too busy, they were already managers.
I’m sure for other Black designers your leadership offers valued visibility. However, how do you feel your leadership presence impacts non-Black designers on the team?
AMANDA: There are aspects of who I am that people [relate to], whether it is their interests, sex, gender, or ethnicity or personality or approach to work. I want to be the type of leader I’ve always wanted. Someone who is good at their craft, but at the same time is a nice, good-hearted person who is easy to work with. I try to be all these things.
At the end of the day I want the team to be really happy. Everyone on the team is evangelists for the experience, how you felt while you were here. Our time together is happening here, but hopefully years from now we still have a relationship, we still talk.
GRAEME: For folks who are non-Black, especially women, I think they see the same thing and say, ‘Hey you know the workforce is a lot more diverse now.’ For anyone else, they are looking at me as a leader who they can learn from and draw experiences from. Hopefully, I’m an inspiration to them, as well, and they all definitely inspire me, so it’s not necessarily just a top-down thing. It really is just creating a community in the workplace.
How do you feel the impact of your design leadership trickles down to our products and member experience?
AMANDA: I challenge the team to think about people outside themselves … whether that’s accessibility, inclusivity–even when we think about the imagery that’s going into our product.
Even visually, before Lasik [eye surgery] I had issues with the way I would see–not being able to see certain things on the screen, not seeing colors in the same way others did. So I always think about how that manifests into the design, making sure we’re not using too small typefaces or there isn’t clutter sitting on top of our imagery.
There’s so much more to accessibility than these things I just mentioned, like so, so much more. I’m super excited to learn. I’m a big advocate of self-development. I’m always thinking about how to improve myself and I encourage that from the team. I don’t think that’s necessarily because I’m a Black woman, I think that has to do a lot with just the fact that I experienced a career change. But I think sometimes it does come from feeling like I’m a representative. Because of that, I try to be best in class.
GRAEME: Diversity of thought [leads] to way more diverse solutions and it trickles down to our products. Even in our events, even celebratory moments like Pride Month. That’s even something I look at with admiration because I consider myself straight, so I’m not an expert in terms of the LGBTQIA+ community. I love seeing all of the communications and the press and the events that we do. When you hop on our SoulCycle at-home bike and you’re seeing Pride rides and different features like that, it really shows our end users just how inclusive we are internally as a company and our products are as well.
What do you think can be done to increase Black leadership at Equinox, in the design space and/or more broadly?
AMANDA: The people who are in leadership right now must run teams with an inclusive mindset. They need to create an environment where people feel like they can really be whatever they want to be, because when you’re hiding yourself, when you’re making yourself small, and when you are hurting–you’re not doing your best work.
We need more people like me and more people like you staying in the industry. Our retention, and making sure we’re continuing to have attrition because there’ve been Black people in this industry for years, but they don’t stay. They don’t stay. More people who are excelling to the C-Suite. I would love to see another Black person in our C-Suite. I would love to see another senior Black person at our company. Representation really matters– it really, really does.
As someone coming from an underserved community, you just don’t have access to the schooling and so on. It’s kind of why I got into teaching, because I wanted to give back in that way. That is really what’s going to change the game. It is really people feeling they have room to grow, because if you feel like you don’t have room to grow, you’re not going to stay. You’re going to be like me and freelance. I stopped freelancing because I wanted to come back and I wanted to lead. I felt like a leader forever, I just wasn’t empowered to do so.
GRAEME: Since the pandemic, we’ve learned that working remotely works for a lot of people and I would love to see companies like ours really expand their recruitment process. I want to make sure that we can get qualified people [working here] regardless of where they live in the country and not require them to live in or around New York City, in or around LA, in or around Austin, etc. because being able to live in those areas have their own filtration process. If you don’t already live there and are exceeding in that market, moving there is very difficult if you are coming from a background where you already are playing catch-up with just the bare necessities like trying to get yourself through college or trying to get your first job. You’ll normally get overlooked previous to that.
I would love to see us go out and get really good qualified candidates–Black, Brown, from the middle of the country who just graduated with an associate’s degree who applied and their design skills are amazing. [If] they are a great qualified candidate, we should be able to hire that person.
