Diversifying TypeDrawers

Stephen Coles

Thanks for sharing your personal experience, Lila. I know your story isn’t uncommon. It’s a harsh truth for us to face, but we need to hear it. Everyone at TypeDrawers is deprived when someone chooses not to contribute — whether it’s a question or an answer. I want everyone here to have the same kind of positive experience you had elsewhere, but this thread has shown we have a long way to go.

What gives me a shred of hope is that the majority of responses in this conversation have been receptive and respectful, and I’ve seen many TD regulars learn a lot from the various contributions — especially from newcomers and women. I’ve also seen other threads prove to be helpful to all sorts of members. 

Lila, I hope you (and others who are legitimately hesitant) can still give TD a chance. Put the forum to the test the next time you have a question. It’s the only way we can get better.

Ofir Shavit

Lila Symons said:

It’s sad that so many cannot have that experience on TypeDrawers.

I think you should have posted it here.

Probably you wouldn't have the same experience as of asking the question in person to someone you trust. 

Typedrawers is an open environment, it is like throwing your question/work out to the space, people sits here behind screens and keyboards. You don't know who they are they don't know you (probably the majority) it must be involved with a risk. More than that, you don't know if your question is "smart" or "stupid", you (someone else) don't know if your work is "good" or "bad" and how will people react to it?

In an open environment you can't put a gate and make sure all the people that get in are nice, sensitive and "know how to behave".

I feel that fear every time I'm about to post here, and frankly, at any open environment, I may say something stupid, my English certainly annoy many, my work and things I care most about surely invoke resistance, criticism and all kinds of hostile reactions, not to mention my origin. But not just. There are also friendly people here and anything in between.

So, the risk is there, and it is higher depending on my work/question and my ignorance(!). Now what is my defense? (And no, I don't think that anytime you want to post here or anywhere something you have to prepare yourself like going to a battle, i'm just trying to clear my point and it may be very subtle as well).

My defense is doing my part. I check if someone already asked my question. I verify that my question is real and I really need an answer, if it is something I find important and helpful (in things I want to share, a thing or opinion). This is my "defense". This is the ground I'm standing at, and when it is, there are not many unexpected reactions that can knock me down, and i'm ready to get it out, focused on my interest.

In professional type design related issues I will probably receive a very good professional advice/answer here on Typedrawers. In some cases it will not be "wrapped" as I wish it would, but I will be very careful, sometimes things seems hostile and they aren't, and in these cases the challenge is the biggest. We have so many differences that misinterpretation is very easy. Go figure the humor, ways of expression and personal background of everyone out there.

My "trick" is to strip out the "package" and examine the content, surprisingly in many cases this reveals more valuable content from criticism and "not nice" remarks than others.

But most of all it is important not to step back, we should communicate and contribute. You can't demand or expect the whole world to always be gentle and serve you everything in the manner you find proper, but you can do it yourself. And in a way, this is even your responsibility. And you can both profit of it and benefit others.

Lila Symons

@Stephen Coles, it's responses I have seen throughout the site and on this thread (especially in the last few weeks) that make myself and others not want to participate and seek alternative spaces to interact with people in this industry.

Yes, I recently created a thread and really enjoyed reading the responses, but still...

Dyana Weissman

Here is an excellent article on fighting unconscious bias. While it focuses on racism, the lessons might be applied to any underrepresented group. 

The most compelling sentence for me is: “The most effective, Lai found, involved exposing people to so-called counter-stereotypical images.” 

Although this exercise has been done before, the article does speak about lasting change, which suggests we should continue to practice this periodically. Especially for the newbies, and there are always newbies. What are some valuable contributions made by members of our community who don't belong to the dominant groups? 

Chris Lozos

We have only begun the long journey of showing minorities on TV as just ordinary folk and not an outcome of pervasive stereotypes.  When we see shows and movies where we don't hear viewers talk about "the Black guy" or "the Hispanic Women" and just identify characters as just people not so different from ourselves, we have many steps to go.  We have to try to put away the need to affix blame on whomsoever and just follow a path of doing our best as individuals to succeed in our own lives. We truly can only change our own actions and lead by example. In our tiny typography world. we can just walk right in and set up shop without assuming there is a conspiracy. Life is hard for all of us, but we tend to only truly see our own struggle.  We can join together and make the struggle easier but we each have to give up the comfort of laying blame on some group which we are not a part of. The greatest progress comes when we can look in the mirror with no one else looking and tell ourselves the hard truth--"What could I have done to make this better before and in the future?"

Ofir Shavit

IndraKupferschmid said:

But my greatest wish for Type Drawers is more stories. Can we have a “lore” section, please? I wish Cherie Cone would come over and tell some of her Mike Parker stories, e.g. how she and Mike speeded down a staircase in a car on the way to the airport in Basel (?) after an ATypI conference. Or Cynthia Batty tell more about the early days of digital type like she did on the ATypI mailing list a few years ago. Or David Berlow. Or David Lemon. And Roger Black. I want to hear everything about manual paste-up times from Mark Simonson, heck I would send him a weekly cake if we could get him to write a regular column!

I think there's a great potential here, maybe it can be done in the form of weekly interviews? We can open a new category of discussions to place those interviews, an interview can be made along a week or two (to give time to answer the questions and tell the stories). Looks like Indra and probably others can ask the right questions to the right persons.

kupfers

@Ofir Shavit Alphabettes.org

Ofir Shavit

@IndraKupferschmid Thanks!
I think it can be done here as well in a more casual and immediate form.

Chris Lozos

Kudos to Tiffany, the original Alphabetty :-)

Ray Larabie

I was listening to an interview with Annie Atkins on Monotype Creative Characters and I remembered this discussion. Seven years have passed—do you think progress has been made in the area of diversity in type design?  It got heavy at times, but I feel like it was type's “Sarkeezian moment” where people who were unaware or felt unaffected by diversity issues had to really think about it for the first time. There are type designers working today that were children when we had this discussion, and I wonder if they're dealing with the same barriers that were in place back in 2015.

John Savard

Victoria Rushton said:

Folks, first thing, I have very little patience for what you think is an "oversensitivity problem." People have been dealing with systemic oppression since forever, having their rights withheld and lives taken away because of privileges they were born lacking, while privileged people either could never see these imbalances, or actively condoned them. And when the underprivileged finally try to speak up about it, the privileged are like, "what no, everything's fine, you're being too sensitive!" Because it's always been fine for them. Enough already. Shutting up for a minute to allow for someone else who historically hasn't had a chance to speak will not hurt you. Surrendering your desire to say whatever you want to and underprivileged person in a given moment to allow them the general comfort you've had life is probably a good idea. Can we be done with whining about oversensitivity and "imaginary" problems yet? This is like square one of being an ally.

One would think that so reasonable a statement would produce a unanimously positive response. That is, if one was hiding under a rock, and not paying attention to the news.

So of course there are going to be those who will view this as advocacy of what they see as political correctness taken to its current modern excessive extreme.

One point made earlier in this thread was that the discussion seemed to be focused only on race and sex. I would have thought that the same principles would apply to LGBQT concerns and to ableism as well, and this was not an issue, even if problems related to race and sex were encountered more in this forum.

Because type design is an artistic pursuit and not an engineering discipline, however, I would have thought that most of the participants in this forum - at least those who are professional type designers - would have had a college or University education related to their field, and from that milieu, particularly if they're younger, and hence more recent graduates - would be well aware of current discussions about privilege, and would not find new rules addressing this to be... you know... some incomprehensible minefield of bizarre politically correct nonsense that they couldn't possibly anticipate so as to keep themselves out of trouble. I just didn't expect this forum to be one of those places that has that kind of problem.

Naturally, from my own position of privilege, I had not noticed that this forum had a problem, and was failing to avoid repelling women in particular. I will admit that because of my position of privilege, I'm not well-qualified to see that kind of problem. But I am surprised that this forum is having all that much difficulty in responding to the issue, as I would have expected widespread agreement with the premise.

Well, perhaps except for one thing. If this forum has been, in the past, so toxic and misogynistic, however invisibly to me that may have been, that there are virtually no women participating in it, then one key aspect of the desired change - white males not monopolizing the discussions so that other voices can be heard - would simply result in a lack of replies to threads rather than a more diverse discussion.

The logical conclusion, of course, is that we also need a recruiting drive... to which a quite reasonable reply would be, why should type designers who are women have to come here to do the work of helping us clean up our act. So, given that this thread has been around for seven years, and apparently the issue has not been addressed, despite (I presume) goodwill towards addressing it on the part of our moderation team... I submit this guess as to what might be the rock on which we have run aground.

James Puckett said:

So to bring women to Typedrawers we should treat their ears like delicate snowflakes that mighy crumble from the shock of impoliteness or an utterance of

Here is a point to which I feel I am able to make a useful and informative reply.

Sometimes, when it is desired to avoid the use of strong language, the word "mess" is used as a replacement for the F-word. Also, jazz, now only the name for a genre of music, although sometimes used in phrases such as "to jazz up something", once was used in that manner as well.

From the way in which the phrase "to mess up something" is used, it should be possible to see that the F-word is not merely a vulgar word having the meaning "to engage in sexual intercourse". If that was all it was, then, indeed, it would be sexist to view women as delicate flowers that would wilt at the sound of vulgarity.

But another meaning - in fact, the primary meaning - of the F-word is "to rape". Women are the primary potential and actual victims of rape. That's why they have a problem with men bandying about that particular word in a casual fashion.

Ray Larabie

Right. Maybe I'd better wait another seven years and check in again.

KP Mawhood

John Savard said:

But another meaning - in fact, the primary meaning - of the F-word is "to rape". Women are the primary potential and actual victims of rape. That's why they have a problem with men bandying about that particular word in a casual fashion.

The vast majority of suicide victims / survivors are male. Speculating on the reasons for that is not the place for a public type forum.

IMHO I'm here to read about and/or participate in discussions about type. 

Ray Larabie said:

Right. Maybe I'd better wait another seven years and check in again.

I think it'll take longer than that.

Mods, please could we close this thread?