Resources
A curated list of organizations and initiatives for female 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.
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 get free mentorship via their Mentor Match program.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.