CREATIVE DIRECTOR, FORD FOUNDATION, BROOKLYN NY
I’m a designer, educator, and community organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. I’ve led design and brand work for non-profits, news organizations, political campaigns, and technology startups. Today, I serve as the creative director at the Ford Foundation, overseeing brand strategy, multimedia, editorial, and design work across the foundation’s global communications.
The Ford Foundation is an independent organization working to address inequality and build a future grounded in justice. For more than 85 years, it has supported visionaries on the frontlines of social change worldwide, guided by its mission to strengthen democratic values, reduce poverty and injustice, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement. Today, the foundation has headquarters in New York and 10 regional offices across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Tell us how and why you became involved in socially responsible communications, any thoughts on why design can be an especially effective tool for this goal, and, if you wish, give us an example of a project of which you are proud.
At Ford Foundation, our ideas of justice are shaped by design, from the words we read to the images we see and the sounds we hear. These are the core tools of any good designer, and for a kid whose “career” started making takeout menus for my parent’s Chinese restaurant and went on to work in tech, political campaigns, newsrooms, and now philanthropy, translating the complex to the accessible came naturally.
At Ford, we recognized that the world has forever changed. And it became clear to me that the foundation needed a visual identity that reflected this moment. Our new visual identity, launched in 2023, drew on a rich visual history of social justice movements, the complexity of our world today, and the future we — together with our grantees — are building: a future grounded in justice and brimming with hope and opportunity.
Given the confluence of events and challenges our society now faces, does this moment in time present any special opportunities, urgencies, obstacles to designing for good?
Designing is simply using your imagination to solve problems, and many of the biggest challenges we’re facing today exist because of a lack of imagination. And the areas where Ford works are ever more complex and intersectional, requiring skilled translators to bring these ideas to the mainstream. Design, and the tools to design, have never been more accessible. That means it’s all the more essential that we use these skills to direct attention toward the ideas, individuals, and institutions fighting for a better world.
