Los Angeles Art Director and Associate Creative Director

Grow with Google: Black Women Lead

As a part of Google’s commitment to help skill the Black community – specifically Black women – Grow with Google launched a new, collaborative partnership in 2021 between the sororities of the Divine Nine sororities, (which includes Alpha Kappa Alpha, Delta Sigma Theta, Sigma Gamma Rho, and Zeta Phi Beta), the Links, and Dress for Success to give the resources and digital tools / skills needed to grow in the modern workplace to a very influential class of job-seeking leaders.

This initiative, named Grow with Google: Black Women Lead, provides a series of customized Grow with Google workshops focused on women’s empowerment, the job search/application process, career development, and peer mentorship. The goal of this collaboration — the first of its kind — is to help 100k Black women build digital skills that are critical for employment in today’s digital economy by 2022. Each partner organization was supplied with Google suite templates for all the assets showcased below so they could each implement and roll out the initiative to their own constituents and communities through program awareness, outreach, training, webinars, and workshop efforts.

Credits:
Client: Google
Agency: Mass Appeal
VP of Client Services: Brett Garber
VP of Creative Strategy: Jon Colclough
Strategist: Danielle Turner
Project Manager: Laura Reid
Copywriter: Natelégé Whaley
Art Director: Saata Bangura
Designer & Illustrator: Laetitia Auguste
Motion Designer: Hannah Wong‍

MANIFESTO
“Make Way”
Our future needs Black women. A Black woman's survival depends on being ahead of her time, even in the face of adversity. So she's already there in the future: envisioning, creating, and marching what we need before we realize it.
She's proven this in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, our governments, in her artwork, and her activism. From generation to generation, she is her community's heartbeat wherever you find her. From generation to generation, we've benefitted from her selfless, often uncredited innovation.
But if Black women are our real-life superheroes, where are the resources to allow them to soar as high as they deserve? What if we gave Black women the opportunities, investments, training, and mentoring to match their endless contributions to society? That's the future we should all be moving toward. Enough what-ifs. It's time to make way.

CREATIVE CONCEPT
Creative Research + Mood Boards

The mood board above was used as a point of inspiration for the design direction. This direction takes the approach of creating an elevated and polished look and feel to represent the next steps after one graduates, getting a first job, or making the next move professionally. This approach included these 4 core visual elements, as they were deeply rooted to the culture and purpose of the initiative:

Illustrations of postural silhouettes of Black women of various expressions of self and body types in stances that exude power, resilience, beauty, and intelligence, juxtaposed with clusters or expressive explosions of symbols.
An Afrofuturism aesthetic, creating the blueprint for the future. Afrofuturism evaluates the past and future to create better conditions for the present generation of Black people through the use of technology, science, and art.
Subtle touches of Afrikana alphabet characters that have meanings tied to the themes and goals of this campaign, used as abstract, secondary graphics within an expressive “collage” behind each silhouette, infusing the theme of looking back to look forward.
A bold integration of the main Google color palette as a visual through-line.

VISUAL DIRECTION
Final Figures