Web Design Dev magazine just released a list of who they think are the 30 most influential people in web design and it’s ruined my Saturday morning.
I understand that it’s hard to put together lists of the most talented in a very vast pool of incredibly intelligent people. But it is so disappointing to see that of the apparent 30 most influential people in web design, only 2 are women, and the staggering majority of the rest are white men. Ok fine, there are a few Asian men in there but it reads like the door list to the exclusive White Boy Club - come on in if you’re white, middle class, have external genitalia and laugh at fart jokes.
C’mon guys, this is 2009 and this list could be from 1997. Guess what, women work in this industry too - and particularly in web design. I’d understand the skewing of the list a bit more if it were the most influential web developers or coders but design? I’m not suggesting that women should be elevated to make the list artificially, they are out there if you bother to look.
Look around at the Web Directions conferences, or at SXSW - it’s getting to be a fairly even split of men to women, and guess what - those women work in the design and dev industry, they don’t just serve coffee and muffins to you.
I don’t know if the people who put together the list just surrounds themselves by white men, or if they think there aren’t really influential women web designers out there - I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they just live in a white-man bubble.
But I think it’s really sad to see and just makes me lose a little bit more faith that the web industry is growing up.
As a tangent to your point, where are the inspirational web designers who are not located in America or the UK? Where are the Flash designers?
The list of web designers really should have been renamed “web designers that have established themselves as the most visible on the web”
I guess that’s the problem with those top lists, one person tries to justify a bias viewpoint that somehow becomes “credible” just because of the wording in the post tile.
Yeah I did notice the list was majority American, with a few spatterings of poms and one or two others.
Maybe it should be called “Web designers that are influential in the limited circle that I move in”.
And half of the women are (is) Belgian!