Design x Rebecca Brooker
Co-Founder of Queer Design Club
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Casey Magnuson on Thursday, August 20, 2020.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I am a Trinidadian born designer, educated in the US and currently living in Argentina. I have a nontraditional design background. I was always creative growing up, but it wasn’t until I downloaded (more like pirated) Photoshop when I was 14 that I started jamming and making things on the computer. It unlocked this new part of me. I loved making flyers for my secondary school events and wanted to keep doing it, so that’s when I started to think about graphic design seriously.
Trinidad didn’t have a lot to offer in terms of design education at the time. I had to look at going to school abroad, which I was lucky to be able to do and blessed to be able to afford. When I began studying design, I started to understand what design with a capital D meant, outside of my little Photoshop collages.
Now I’m living in Argentina with my partner and enjoying life in South America. So far, it’s been a pretty nice change after living in New York for several years.
Tell us about your journey from Trinidad to Buenos Aires.
The first jump I made was from Trinidad to New York when I was 18, and it was the biggest one I’ve made in my life. 18 is such a crucial age. My grandma lived in New York, so I was very familiar with the environment and felt comfortable going there. Coming from Trinidad, a lot of our incoming media was American, so we knew almost as much about American culture as we did our own. We were always looking at America, even if America wasn’t looking at us.
I went to school at St. John’s University in Queens, and many people had never heard of Trinidad before. In my tiny little design program, they were like “Where’s that again?” I would be talking in my Trini accent, and people would say “Oh my God, where are you from?”
It started preluding every conversation I would have, which got annoying, but I eventually just got used to it.
What led you from New York to Buenos Aires?
After living in NYC for a few years, my US visa situation eventually led to me leaving for Argentina. Being an immigrant in the US was definitely tricky, as I was there temporarily, and my visa status was always in the back of my mind. When you’re an international student, your number one goal is to get a job and get an H1B visa. It doesn’t happen for many people because most companies don’t want to take the risk, but the real estate company I was working for at the time sponsored my H1B, which I was stoked about.
And then it got rejected.
My lawyer told me I had three weeks to leave the country, so I ended up moving to Buenos Aires. I was experiencing a tornado of emotions due to being kicked out of the US, so I moved back home to Trinidad for a month. This was after being away for six years. I was going through a lot in my personal life, and then someone said, “Here’s a job if you can move to Argentina.” I took it.
My old employer had recommended me for the role because they were setting up a design team there, and they needed someone with brand experience. I did zero research and just hopped on a jet to Argentina. I’ve been here in Bueno Aires for about two years working at this great agency. I’ve been blessed and really lucky to have the opportunities come to me that way.
You co-founded Queer Design Club. How did you and your co-founder, John, meet each other?
The story of how we met illustrates the power of social media. I had the idea of forming some kind of community for a while after graduating from college. My design program was small, and I was looking to connect with other people outside of my coworkers. I wanted to meet more queer people and more graphic designers, and had been thinking about where I would go to find them. Where does one start looking for people like yourself? A few times, I punched “queer graphic designers” into Google but didn’t get many results. I found graphic design archives and different things, but no community.
One day I was on Twitter when I saw someone had set up a page for LGBTQ+ designers, and I instantly messaged that person. I told them I had a similar idea, had put together a deck of ideas for it, and we should talk. That person was John, who wrote me back and said “I’d love to. Truthfully, I made this page while I was tipsy, but I’d love to do it.”
From there, we just started video chatting. I didn’t know him yet, he was still a total stranger, but we met pretty regularly for about two months and built the directory and the Slack channel. That’s how we got going. We started with really small goals, and we’ve just been chipping away at it ever since.
“We started with really small goals, and we’ve just been chipping away at it ever since.”
Has anything changed for QDC with the pandemic, or is it just business as usual?
We’re only about a year old; that’s an important distinction. We’ve grown very quickly and have around 1,500 active members currently in our Slack channel and over 700 members in our directory.
Since the pandemic started, we’ve definitely seen the amount of activity in our Slack increase. Many people are searching for community, and they now have time to ponder what their community is outside of their immediate physical group of friends. They’re searching for people they can find value in, whether professionally or socially. We really saw the community come together when the first wave of COVID-19 happened, and people started getting laid off. A bunch of community members had the idea of creating an internal database of people looking for work. It’s the small ideas like that which keep the community going. It shows that people are invested in each other. It’s been an act of love and an act of people coming together to try to make the world a little better for people like us.
From what I’ve seen, the community is consistently positive. How have you kept those positive vibes as you’ve grown?
The truthful answer is I don’t know. I think it’s a testament to every single person who participates and the vibe that they bring. There’s no magic formula that John and I have used to curate the space’s people. We just set the tone. We’re building this thing because we’re excited about building a community for queer people and if you are excited too, cool. If you’re not, that’s cool too. Do your own thing. I think that kind of laid back approach has helped us maintain the vibes. There’s nothing that people are expecting. We’re a positive, loving community that will try to uplift you at every opportunity.
We’ve also been cautious about words and the ways that we speak in the community. We want to be as inclusive as possible, and in the beginning, we set those guidelines and boundaries. We wrote a code of conduct, and we stick to it at all times. We’ve also set up specific triggers for words that we don’t use in the group. I really must say that we’ve been lucky with the community, as everyone that’s come through our doors has come with the best intentions.
QDC is a community for designers. How do you define or limit what a designer is?
We don’t. We really don’t have any kind of definition for it. We ask people to self-identify as a designer or person working in design. We don’t police what we consider design, the same way we don’t police people’s identity. It’s built on the trust that we say exactly who we are and what we expect you to get out of this community, and if you feel like that might apply to you, jump in.
We primarily focus on graphic designers, product designers, and anyone working within the intersection of tech, design, and art. That’s the majority of our community. That doesn’t mean it’s not welcoming to someone who might just be thinking about getting into a design career. You may not consider yourself a designer yet, but we can certainly help and guide you towards starting a design career if you have any interest in it.
Recently, you released the results of your Queer Design Count. What prompted you to run this survey?
The first-ever event that we had for QDC was in San Francisco during San Francisco Design Week. We ran an event called Queer x Design, and people were wondering about the demographics of our community. John had presented data from the big design census, which was a good benchmark but didn’t have enough data about LGBTQ persons specifically. There was one question in there that stated “Are you LGBTQ or no?” and it just wasn’t a deep dive into anything about our community. To better serve the community we were hoping to build, we needed to know who they were.
So, John and I embarked on this mission to create a survey to better understand what queer people were feeling in the design industry. We ran it from November to December of last year and ended up with around 1,200 responses. The results were really informative and gave us an incredible snapshot of the experience of queer graphic designers.
To be better, we have to keep understanding our industry and all these companies that say they’re working towards “Diversity and Inclusion.” Are they actually doing it? Do we see progress? Are the feelings of the impacted communities changing? That’s what we plan to track with the Queer Design Count.
There were a few questions about Diversity and Inclusion programs (D&I) on the survey. What did you see in the data?
We saw that only 41% of the respondents said that their companies have any D&I initiatives. That’s already a huge percentage of queer people working in companies without a diversity and inclusion initiative in any form. That’s really bad, and the more worrying fact was that less than a third of these companies had D&I initiatives that include diverse sexualities. They’re not talking about sexuality at work, and that’s a problem. Also, less than a quarter had initiatives about diverse genders. It’s a problem when you’re hiring queer people and you have no programs to educate or support them.
We also found that the people who said their companies included education around gender and sexuality had more successful D&I programs. There’s a lot of benefits to having a very robust and inclusive educational program in terms of diversity and inclusion. Once you create an environment that makes people feel safe, they’re automatically going to be more productive and feel more excited about being at the company.
13% of our respondents said that their companies don’t have any LGBTQ-specific benefits. This number gets even worse for trans folks—they have minimal access to companies where trans benefits are covered. People who have to hide their identity at work tend to be unhappy, and unhappy people are unproductive.
“People who have to hide their identity at work tend to be unhappy, and unhappy people are unproductive.”
Even within our own community, we find marginalization. The trans community has been heavily discriminated against, being that the further your identity is from a gay white man, the harder your life can be. That has been a constant theme throughout our entire count for people who divert from “normal” or represented queerness. Trans people, non-binary people, and people of color have a statistically harder time getting hired, having benefits, and getting paid their worth. It gets increasingly more difficult when you have multiple marginalized identities and no form of support or inclusion for them.
Did anything in the survey results surprise you?
We weren’t expecting to see the real disparities in such a granular form between queer white designers and queer designers of color. When we talk about people of color, I specifically want to say Black and Latinx folks. In our data, the second-largest group of people represented in the design industry is Asian people. There is a massive disparity between the numbers of white and Asian designers in the industry and the numbers of almost all other ethnic groups.
We realized that while the design industry is getting a lot better, it’s only for a very limited set of people. Queer people of color who have made it to leadership levels or senior levels are not necessarily a symbol of the progress of the industry as a whole. We saw that 22% of designers of color made less than $25,000 a year versus 15% of white designers. That’s a huge seven-point margin. When you look at the numbers, there are a good couple of hundred people who are making less than $25,000 a year just based on their race. We knew that to be true to some extent without the data, but once we started to quantify people’s experiences, we could further understand how bad this problem is and how deep it goes.
What are some of the challenges queer designers are facing today?
One of our designers’ biggest challenges is finding their place at work and finding a company that supports them and their growth. I think every queer designer wants to feel the way straight designers do at work: confident, empowered, and able to be heard in a room. I believe there are a lot of biases that hold people back. From the Queer Design Count, we had some open-ended responses, and a lot of it was traumatic to read. People would say things like, “I hate my job because I go to work, and I get misgendered every single day.” People face stuff you’d never think were problems every day in the workplace, and they’re usually related to bias.
On the flip side of bias is finding support. You can get rid of bias, but it needs to be replaced with support systems. We’re doing a lot of work to identify and combat discrimination, but we’re not doing much work to support people in the workplace.
83% of designers reported facing some form of bias in the workplace. For trans designers, it was 91%. To drill down even further and put it into context, 40% of designers have had to point out exclusionary design decisions in the workplace. 13% of respondents said they had been asked to work on anti-LGBTQ experiences. I feel really strongly that I would not want to work for a client that is against my existence. Even if it’s my job, I should have a choice in that. It’s okay to have different opinions, but my gender, sexuality, and the way that I exist in this world are not something that I think a client should have an opinion on.
What advice would you give someone, maybe a junior designer, who’s been put in that situation?
It’s tricky because every situation is different. I’m at the point in my career where I could choose not to work for a company like Chick-fil-A, for example. For people with less experience in their career, this is tough because you need a job and are trying to establish yourself. Therefore I’d never tell someone not to take a job if they really needed it. If you’re lucky enough to choose where you work, I think you should be careful about where you spend your time and energy. We spend a minimum of 40 hours a week at work—it takes up a big chunk of our lives—so why not spend that time working towards something that makes the world a better place?
So, that’s my advice. Try your best to vote with your dollars and your time, and work towards the things that make our existence easier. If that’s not possible for you, do what you need to do until you can make it possible.
What is on the horizon for you and QDC?
As I’ve grown this community, I’ve been thinking a lot about my personal purpose in the design industry and what I’m giving to it. I’d like to work on a product or in-house at a company that is focused on a socially good mission or doing something to improve people’s lives. I’m excited about that and one day hope to turn QDC into my full-time job. We’re working on becoming an incorporated entity. Not sure what incorporation that would be yet, but that’s something we’re working on. We’ve seen the value it brings to the community, and now we need to get our shit together formally.
I’ve been working on putting structures in place and writing up five-year plans for QDC, and I think that’s where my career will lead me. It’s really part-time running my organization and part-time involving myself in some socially good missions, programs, or companies that align with my personal values. I’m very much at a place in my life where I want to feel happy about the work I’m doing, and for me to feel happy, I need to be contributing to the world in a positive way.
“…and for me to feel happy, I need to be contributing to the world in a positive way.”
Rapid Fire Questions
What’s your favorite thing to do in your free time?
My favorite thing is being outside, going for walks, or hiking in nature. I spent so much time on the computer that I need to do the opposite of that. I love, love, love being at the beach; that’s the island girl in me. I also practice boxing, which I feel passionate about. I work a lot of my energy and stress out on the bag.
What is your favorite podcast?
Everything is Alive and Beach Too Sandy, Water Too Wet are excellent ones. Also, Maurice Cherry’s Revision Path is great for learning about Black designers in our industry.
Who inspires you?
There are a lot of young leaders in the design industry that I’m inspired by. Amélie Lamont is one of my dearest friends, and I consider her one of my mentors—she’s always been a great voice of reason and has opened a lot of doors for me. I was introduced to some of Antionette Carroll’s work this year. She’s fantastic, and the work that Creative Reaction Lab does is worth taking a look at. They’re changing the design industry.
I also admire a Trinidadian designer Tanya Rhule. She founded one of the first Caribbean design magazines, Designer Island, a magazine that I’ve been reading for a few years now. She is a person in the Trini design industry that I really look up to.
If you could live anywhere, where would it be?
Italy or Portugal. I studied abroad in Italy, and it was my favorite place in all of Europe. Portugal because it has the beach, and it is the perfect European country for me.
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Outgoing, ridiculous, and laid-back.
Can you share a fun fact about yourself?
I’m a competitive Scrabble player. The only thing I did consistently for seven years in high school was play Scrabble every Thursday and participate in Scrabble tournaments. They are just as nerdy as they sound, but it was the most fun I’ve ever had. What sucks is that I can’t play Scrabble with ordinary people now; I can’t play with people outside of a very high-stakes environment.
