2020: Note #21 - The Designer

Isn't this picture beautiful? This is the picture that my company's Diversity and Inclusion Steering Committee uses. I absolutely love the way it conveys diversity, without using images of people or shades of white and brown that imply diversity is only about race. Diversity is about everything -- race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age...the list goes on.

As the Chair of the Steering Committee, I struggled to find an image that conveyed diversity in its broadest sense. I kept finding pictures of hands overlapping or of mugs with different shades of coffee. They were nice, but they didn't really evoke what I was aiming for.

Up stepped one of the Steering Committee members. "I'll find something appropriate", she said. And did she ever! This picture conveys diversity in all its beautiful glory. It might seem like a small thing, finding the right photograph. But to me this is a very big deal. There's so much that happens emotionally when someone looks at a picture, and we needed this to be just right.

Thanks to my teammate for digging through loads of pictures and coming up with the perfect one.