By: Design Studies Institute Staff
Women have always been trailblazers in the design field, introducing new and innovative ideas. Design would not be what it is without the amazing women working in it. As the field has previously been male-dominated, in a report by the Design Census by AIGA, women are now 61% of designers. However, only 11% of those women are leaders in the field. Historically, women have made design what it is, but have not gotten their recognition. Here are a few women who paved the way for other designers.
Paula Scher is known for being the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991. Scher is a graphic designer, starting off as an art director, and has moved on to work with an incredible range of clients. These clients include Microsoft, where she rethought the Windows 8 Logo, and is known for her question: “Your name is Windows. Why are you a flag?”
She helped Microsoft reimagine its logo to bring it back to its roots - the window.
Carolyn Davidson is the unknown face behind Nike. She was the creator of the famous Nike swoosh. While in college, Davidson was looking for work to earn extra cash. A professor overheard her and hired her to work on some designs for him for $2 an hour. She designed a few logos for him for his side businesses, one of which would become Nike. She worked on the logo for 17 hours, earning herself just $35 for creating one of the most famous logos in modern times. Davidson is still a graphic designer for Nike, and has her recognition as the creator of the swoosh.
Zaha Hadid is widely recognized as the most influential architect of the early 21st century. She redefined what architecture was supposed to look like, introducing painting as a tool and making her work much more abstract. She won many prestigious awards and was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Award in 2004. She has done incredible things for architecture, combating the norms of society as a woman, and as a designer.
Mina Markham, who has worked as a senior engineer at Slack, is an active advocate for women and girls who want to pursue a career in coding or computer design. She is a teacher at Black Girls Code, founded a chapter of Girls Develop It, and travels as a speaker to tell her story and help others start their own. She previously worked with Hilary Clinton, designing and refining Clinton’s digital presence during her presidential campaign, starting Markham’s successful career.
Eileen Fisher is well-known for her fashion brand named after herself, and rightly so. Fisher started up her business from the ground up, with only a few hundred dollars in her pocket. She had her ideas in mind, and did not let anything stop her from becoming the fashion designer she had always wanted to be - even though she did not know how to sew when she started.
Susan Kare is an influential name in icon design. You may know her work from the early days of Apple, when she created many of the well-known icons that the Macintosh used at its inception. Kare created icons to represent our everyday life with objects such as the trash can, the paintbrush, and more.
Listed at one time as the 88th most powerful woman in Forbes, Tory Burch is a top name in the fashion industry. In the beginning of her career, she bounced around from brand to brand, working for other well-known names such as Ralph Lauren. After creating her own brand, she was able to make it into a billion-dollar company in less than 10 years.
Margaret Calvert is a graphic designer who reinvented road signs. She worked on the design of specific road signs in the U.K. with her partner, creating simple yet eye-catching designs that would be easy for people on the road to understand. After her creation, it reinvented the way that road signs were made.
Jacqueline Casey was a graphic designer known for creating attention-grabbing visuals for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her design pattern was unique as she used the contrast between large and small text to draw eyes to the smaller-sized text. She’s even quoted as saying. “My job is to stop anyone I can with an arresting or puzzling image, and entice the viewer to read the message in small type and above all to attend the exhibition.”
Casey started her journey by earning her bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1949, then working some interior design and advertising jobs, with things eventually coming full circle as she was hired to work underneath the design director of MIT in 1955. Casey once again climbed the ranks and was promoted to the director of the department. This would have been rendered unthinkable for a woman to gain leadership during that time; however, her skillset as a designer displayed that she was a standout candidate that even sexism couldn’t stop.
All of these women have done incredible work in design, all broke norms, and reinvented the world of design. Although all fall under the same umbrella of design, they have all taken diverse paths, creating space for women in each of them. These are not all the influential women who have paved the way for design, and there will be so many more. You, too, can follow your dreams of design, following in the footsteps of many amazing women before you at the Design Studies Institute.
