Resources
A curated list of organizations and initiatives for female-identifying and non-binary people revolving around design. Here, you can get a friendly hand for networking and funding, get design training and career opportunities, raise your expert voice, and showcase your work. Use the filter to find the initiative you’ll benefit from.
This design and research collective works between Cairo and Amsterdam. The female collaboration explores underrepresented political and historical narratives by working with archives via art, design, writing, educational formats, video making, and storytelling.
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The Female Design Council is a professional membership organization that fosters professional growth for womxn in design. They arrange design events, exhibitions, and workshops for the community and members, promote member works on their website and social media, and coordinate monthly virtual meetings and in-person events.
You can easily buy a membership on the website and make the most of the Female Design Council offerings, or apply for Mentor Match program.
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Women Talk Design gives voices to outstanding women and nonbinary speakers from design and tech, matching them with event organizers to craft inclusive events. The organization provides speaking training, hosts events, and raises a community of aspiring speakers.
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Riposte is a magazine and online community for women. It profiles courageous females who are protesting against the norm and gives them a safe space to candidly share their triumphs, passions, and perspectives via interviews. It’s an opportunity to get commissions and show and share your expertise in art, design, business, politics, and other domains.
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This project was initiated by a female designer, Mary Hemingway. It celebrates and inspires women, gender-expansive and nonbinary creatives in the design and creative industry. Design by Women showcases inspiring visual communication—graphic, digital, motion, typeface, visual identity design, and illustration through social media publications, interviews, and profiling.
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Supported by the Italian Association of Visual Communication Design, the AWDA Award is run by a small team of four female curators and a group of volunteers. The biennial award has three categories for professors, researchers, and students. It aims to investigate the languages, poetics, and approaches to graphic design among women, and explore the conditions in which they work.
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SheSays, a nonprofit organization for women and nonbinary people, helps with free mentorship and professional events: awards, screenings, meetups, and conferences. It brings together a vast community of 70,000 members in over 55 cities and has given a voice to 1593 speakers worldwide.
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Futuress is a queer and intersectional feminist learning community and publishing platform under one roof. As a learning community, it offers free and accessible-to-all online lectures, panel discussions, open mics, roundtables, and more. As an online publishing platform, it features stories and perspectives of people who often remain underrepresented, oppressed, and ignored.
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Alphabettes celebrates womxn in type, accumulates their expertise, and showcases their work and research on lettering, typography, and type design. It supports and promotes the work of women and nonbinary people through articles, meetups, and mentorship. Currently, Alphabettes gathers 300+ members from around the world.
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Bye Bye Binary is a multifaceted Franco-Belgian collective, educational experiment, community, variable typographic creation workshop, network, and alliance. The collective explores new graphic and typographic forms adapted to French, taking inclusive and nonbinary writing as a starting point.
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Women of Type was initially an Instagram page created by Jess Goldsmith to build a world where women and nonbinary lettering and typography artists could thrive in the creative landscape. It went viral and became a supportive hub for inspiration, connection, and collaboration. Women of Type resources include a shop selling creators’ work, an insightful blog, a newsletter, and an active social media community.
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The organization strives to reduce the gender gap in tech and design by giving African women tech skills through free mentorship and offline educational events. Meet the community in their social networks and keep an eye on the local happenings.
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Kerning The Gap is a British collective of like-minded people who want to see more diversity in design leadership roles, share experiences, and be inspired to create change. They offer a yearly mentoring program for a small fee, free local design events, and an array of valuable on-site resources.
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The Association for Women in Architecture + Design was initiated in 1915 by a group of female architecture students who were denied entry to a male professional fraternity. Since then, AWA+D has supported women who work in the built environment. It carries out three monthly educational programs, mentors students, graduates, and mid-career professionals, and sets up monthly events. They also provide scholarships and fellowships via their sister organization, AWAF.
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Ladies that UX call themselves a community of women in UX who support each other, push the UX boundaries, and promote skill and talent. The community has chapters in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and each city chapter has slightly different events the community finds necessary. Ladies that UX is also known for Talk UX, their annual international design and tech conference led by women, a YouTube channel with free lectures and talks, and podcasts with notable UXers.
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Feminist Center for Creative Work is a Los Angeles-based intersectional feminist arts organization and transformative media that platforms the work of Black, Indigenous, people of color, queer and trans, low-income, immigrant, and disabled women and nonbinary artists. They organize local and online events, coordinate community programs such as Artists in Residence and Feminist Synth Lab, and maintain Co-conspirator press—a publishing platform for creatives from historically underrepresented communities who address intersectional feminist issues.
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This nonprofit initiative was founded in 2015 by Jessica Walsh and has grown into a vast network with 285 chapters worldwide. It supports creative women and nonbinary people with free mentorship circles, portfolio reviews, talks, and creative meetups. Find a chapter in your city and follow the news to engage in its activities.
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The Design Justice Network teams up people committed to embodying and practicing the Design Justice Network Principles: foreseeing the impact of design, striving to find non-exploitative solutions for work, progressing towards sustainable and community-led outcomes, and the supremacy of the final users. The organization supports like-minded designers with networking opportunities, working groups around specific design topics, and free online meetups.
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Hello Departures is an ever-evolving experimental initiative at the intersection of design pedagogy, strategy, and community. It sponsors Hello Departures Awards for designing Indigenous, Black, People of Color, LGBTQIA+, neurodivergent, people with disabilities, low-income, migrant, diasporic, and age 60+ individuals. Also, the initiative coordinates free talks that you can attend live or watch on YouTube, a yearly design research internship for graphic design students, and occasional themed workshops.
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BIPOC Design History is an educational platform with a series of live and previously recorded design history classes facilitated by Polymode, a bicoastal, queer, minority-owned graphic design studio. Aside from fee-based classes, BIPOC Design History has a huge free resources list you can use in your activities. As an organization, they can organize professional development sessions and workshops for you or your company.
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SUPERRR lab and community unites a loose network of cis and trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people in the arts, science, tech, journalism, activism, and more. SUPERRR people challenge the status quo through their work: starting programs and organizations, launching campaigns, and building community spaces. The lab works on several tech-related enlightenment projects, while the community meets online and in Berlin to chat and exchange ideas.
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GIRLS LIKE US is an independent magazine turning the spotlight on an expanding international community of women and trans people within arts, culture, and activism. The printed magazine is sold in an e-shop alongside some merch. GIRLS LIKE US also has active social networks to showcase community members’ works and occasionally hosts events in European cities.
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Meet GenderFail, a publishing, programming, and archiving platform for works that expand queer subjectivity by looking at queerness as an identity that challenges capitalist, racist, ableist, xenophobic, transphobic, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-environmental ideologies.
You can buy their books and zines or use some of their free Protest fonts—fonts based on protest signs from queer and trans projects and the protests for Black lives.
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This solid font collection was created in 2018 to give visibility to libre fonts drawn by womxn designers, who are often underrepresented in the traditionally conservative field of typography. The fonts are shared under free, libre, and open source licenses that allow anyone to use them, modify their design, contribute more glyphs or styles to their non-nuclear families, build on them, and redistribute them further.
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The CLAIMING*SPACES Collective was started as a group of students, graduates, teachers, and researchers at the Vienna University of Technology. They seek to foster intersectional feminist perspectives in architecture and spatial planning and invite other professionals to participate in the discourse and activities. Here you can find a list of resources, some in German, and watch recordings from two conferences CLAIMING*SPACES organized in 2019 and 2022.
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Type Electives is an online design school that teaches classes focused on letterforms, type design, lettering, and creative technology and holds free events for those who are into type. Also, Type Electives gives scholarships to students from underprivileged and underrepresented communities.
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Women in Design, India is a collective impact initiative striving to expand narratives in design. It builds a diverse future by documenting and amplifying perspectives, experiences, talent, and creativity. The initiative hosts conversations, discourse, and events, and offers a platform to network, meet and learn from like-minded creatives.
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This website features profiles of women in user experience design, interaction design, and UX research. The initiative is a part of the forthcoming book “In Through the Side Door: Fifty Years of Women in Interaction Design” and seeks to shine a light on the hundreds of women in the UX field who have been forgotten, overwritten, and generally left out of history.
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Initiated in 2018 by Svenja Lettera, a Berlin-based graphic designer and art director, this poster publishing platform and online magazine amplifies the visibility of womxn and non-binary designers, and promotes gender equality within the design industry. Posterwomxn also occasionally takes the form of temporary spaces for artistic process via collaboratively organized projects.
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FIDO is a professional platform that raises awareness about the lack of equity in the design sector. It has created an international directory with +200 profiles to showcase women’s talent all around the globe. It also conducts research in creative industries and provides training to boost the careers of women designers.
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Add to our resources list
Know an organization or an initiative that’s helping the female design community? Fill out the form, and if it’s a good fit, we’ll happily add it to the list.