As Paula Scher said in PRINT Magazine in 1993: “Change doesn’t come in one great thump. It comes one by one by one by one, and it looks kind of funny. And then it doesn’t.” There’s a long line of work and words addressing patriarchal design culture and history’s exclusion of women designing, and today’s current swell in activity is indebted to those that have pushed back “one by one by one by one.”

In 1973, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville published a seminal essay in Icographic to raise awareness of feminist graphic design culture, laying the important groundwork for much to come. Martha Scotford’s 1994 ‘Messy History vs. Neat History: Toward an Expanded View of Women in Graphic Design’ also marked a pivotal moment in the discussion. Countless grassroots projects and publications—and later blogs and social media streams—have dedicated themselves to reentering lost design stories into history and to promoting work by contemporary female-identifying designers. In the early ’90s, WD+RU contributed to an emerging discourse on design and feminism, and in recent years, Hall of Femmes’ slim monographs on women in design have counteracted the notion that such publications must be large, weighty tomes. Blogs and initiatives such as Alphabettes, Kerning the Gap, Women of Graphic Design, NotAMuse, Woo, hwod, and many more have highlighted contemporary female practitioners; open-source spreadsheets and databases abound featuring female-identifying type and poster designers; independent print publications promote underrepresented designers, including Riposte, which publishes creative women’s stories, and OOMK, which highlights women from diverse ethnic and spiritual backgrounds; online platform Depatriarchise Design champions intersectional perspectives and runs workshops on design strategies that go beyond binary thinking.

All of this work, and more, comes from feelings of urgency and inequality, a dispersed but collective set of grievances with the status-quo in the design profession. “A complaint can lead to a recognition of what is shared,” writes the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed. So one by one by one by one, we’ll just carry on complaining.