Page 38 - Extra_Bold_movie-clip-edit

76
voice | tré seals
CONVERSATION WITH ROGER PEET
TRÉ SEALS Graphic designer, typeface designer, entrepreneur PRONOUNS He, him
How did you get started on the project of creating fonts? I love branding. Brand- ing makes up about 90 percent of my projects. But in the process of looking for inspiration, I got really bored. Don’t get me wrong, graphic design is my passion, but I just wasn’t inspired by anything I was seeing on Behance, Dribbble, Pin- terest, and even in many design books. It all looked the same, and the fact that people like this monotony really bothered me. I started wondering if I had chosen the wrong career.
This all started in May of 2016. And some time after that, something told me to research the demographics of the design industry. So I did. I found that 84 per- cent of all designers in America are White (>bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm). And that’s when everything started to make sense to me.
I realized that when a single gender and race dominates an industry, there can only be (and has been) one of way of thinking, teaching, and creating. This lack of diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender has led to a lack of diversity in thought, systems (like education), ideas, and, ultimately, creations.
When you hear things like “The majority of women don’t see themselves on
TV” or encounter advertisements filled with stereotypes of underrepresented cultures, this is why. This is not a recent issue. It’s just that now, profits are being affected as the world we live in becomes more diverse. One of the first articles
to bring up the issue of diversity in design was written in 1987 by Dr. Cheryl D. Holmes Miller as her senior thesis. Discovering this text inspired me to start creating fonts based on the history of Civil Rights activism. I knew that I couldn’t simply diversify design’s demographics or educational system. So I tried to figure out a way to introduce a nonstereotypical piece of minority culture into the design vocabulary itself, starting with the basis of any good design—typography.