Project Statement

The exploration of editorial design challenging the gender gap and inequality in the design industry has revealed that there are many gender associations that have been constructed over the years, in particular design movements and theories. Michael Spondé states that ‘anyone who wanders through the classes of our art academies is surprised by the high percentage of women among the students’ (Meer. J, 2018) which does not reflect the current creative industry which is shown to have only 11% of creative directors as women. The idea that the design decisions used within editorial design to challenging this gender gap and inequality was a link made based on the idea that Graphic Design can act as the communications framework through which these messages about what the world is and what we should aspire to’ (Hustwit. G, 2007).

The editorial design work of Cipe Pineles really pushed the idea of content consideration as communication and managed to steer away from the overriding male dominance within the industry by responding against the patriarchal, modernist design. The breaking of boundaries seen in the post-modern movement was an opportunity to break free from the supposed confines of the modern movement, in the creation of a new form of visual expression.

Upon exploration, it is clear that editorial design decisions need to ultimately be neutralised in order to remove any of the gender associations that have been socially constructed within the different design movements as discussed. Editorial design decisions took a focus on spotlighting issues and positively portraying the intelligence of women across the disciplines and elements such as the typeface and colour choice have been shown to effectively communicate in a much more powerful manner through the use of associations that have been socially constructed over the years. Editorial design as a platform to focus on the design work rather than gender will effectively continue to portray a sense of equality between the genders and hypothetically eliminate the attention towards female designers and work towards a better level of equality within the creative industry. 

In response to the written piece, it concluded that over the years there have been some obvious gender focused design styles within editorial and although the issue of the gender inequality within the design industry has been raised as an issue and influencing in terms of communicating the issue has occurred, but it still isn’t necessarily the most effective way to narrow the gap. The practical project was a magazine designed in response the quote about Cipe Pineles: ‘She didn’t teach style – she taught content. She taught you to start with the content of the magazine and then world from there, rather than just think about what design was going to look nice on the page.’ – Melissa Tardiff. In order to remove any gender associations within design that may influence the gender inequality, the magazine will focus on not revealing the designers name before the name of the project and all of the work within will be visually represented in the style of the designer rather than the visual identity of the magazine. The idea of the design being driven by the content within rather than following a uniformed design system will appropriately remove any associations to the particular design styles in regards to gender.