Designing Race

Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) and its founders, Otto Neurath and Gerd Arntz, were among the first to create the pictograms we see all around us. Started in the 1920s, this form of visual communication was designed for a language-like consistency, allowing for quantification and comparison.

The Noun Project boasts that they have icons for everything, in fact, over a million of them—curated by a global community. Despite this multitude of icons, Noun Project member Erika Kim wrote a blog post last year about the perils in depicting race in iconography.

Icons work best when they are simple and concise while depicting things that are often complex. Kim writes that as a result, creating icons that depict race and ethnicity accurately and respectfully is a design problem waiting to be solved. Visual conciseness can quickly turn into overgeneralization and depictions of race often rely on outdated tropes and stereotypes. The results can articulate or perpetuate prejudices and bias.

Kim offers the following advice when designing icons that depict race:

• Ask designers to represent themselves—authorship can be the best way to reclaim your voice
• Seek feedback from a diverse crowd—present work to people of all ages, races, and ethnicities—look for the blind spots
• Aim for comprehensive representation and include as many variations as possible to fit many contexts
• Be aware of implied hierarchies and values and know the history of representations 
• Create new or abstract interpretations

Finally, Kim urges designers to not be afraid to try. The world is full of misrepresentations because of this. Be brave and break through to create new and better representations.

Sources:

https://blog.thenounproject.com/depicting-race-in-iconography-4ee4e4269875

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/icons-for-the-people